Pagans, Heathens and Witchcraft

The old gods are still among us

IN THE STONE CIRCLES OF BRITAIN, to the holidays we celebrate without a second thought, the gods of antiquity still loom large in our psyche. For those whose path takes them from the straight and narrow, the world is a magical place.

From the olden days and up through all the years
From Arcadia to the stone fields of Inisheer
Some say the Gods are just a myth
But guess who I’ve been dancing with
The great god Pan is alive

Pagan holidays: Litha … On summer solstice celebrations, and the dangerous similarities between modern paganism and evangelical Christianity

June 21, 2019 By Todd Atteberry Leave a Comment

On the wheel of the year listing pagan holidays, Litha is perhaps the most problematic.

This hit home to me when I read a blog post recently, from someone who was going to Stonehenge on Midsummer’s morning, to celebrate Litha in the manner of their celtic ancestors. Bloggers aren’t known for accuracy, but what really stuck in my craw was reading today on the CNN news site, that Stonehenge was built – possibly – by the Druids. This is of course, all bullshit.

These are all common beliefs about pagan holidays, Litha being no exception. But the facts show that none of that is true, and so I’m reminded of another religious group who believe in myths about their ancient gods, and ignore science and the facts … fundamental Christianity. A group which pagans as a rule, do their best to avoid similarities.

As one of the pagan holidays, Litha has a problem with Stonehenge

To begin with, Stonehenge wasn’t built by the Celts, nor is there any evidence that they worshipped here. Litha wasn’t the name of the Midsummer celebration, it’s a Saxon term name of the month describing the last half of June and the first half of July, and not in use till thousands of years after Stonehenge was abandoned. Finally, there is no evidence that I know of that points to a Midsummer celebration at Stonehenge.

If you take it as fact that Stonehenge was built to align with the Midsummer solstice – and even that has more than reasonable doubt – it certainly wasn’t a celebration. That took place at Durrington Walls, a couple miles away on the summer solstice. If there was anything going on at its more famous neighbor, it was likely a highly codified ritual, or to use a modern phrase, organized religion. It certainly bore no resemblance to what takes place at Stonehenge on Midsummer’s morning.

There is plenty of archaeological evidence to point to celebrations on Midsummer, or if you choose the pagan holidays Litha, and others, at Durrington Walls and other ancient sites. Bronze and iron age revelers weren’t particularly tidy, so if there was a celebration at Stonehenge it must have been a solemn affair. Totally unlike the anything goes celebration at Stonehenge today. If the ancients witnessed what goes on there today, they’d likely see it as sacrilege.

Winter Solstice at Stonehenge, Pagan Holidays Litha — Stonehenge is actually aligned for the winter solstice, rather than the summer solstice. There is a yearly sunrise celebration at the winter sunrise, but ironically, the winter solstice alignment is for sunset, rather than sunrise.

The celestial celebrations at Stonehenge

The current theory about Stonehenge has the important alignment taking place at the winter solstice. Great you might say, you’ll show up at sunrise on that morning instead. While it’s open on the morning of the winter solstice to anyone who wishes to visit, the problem with that is that the alignment is at sunset the night before. Those thousands of dedicated pagans are showing up about twelve hours too late to miss the crucial moment their ancestors might have designed it for.

Stonehenge was started about 3,500 B.C. It was completed in phases, the last being about 1,500 years later, or about 1,600 BC. Now keep in mind, these people had no written language. In fact the people who started Stonehenge aren’t the same people who completed it. And none of them wrote down what they were doing. There is no evidence that a thousand years after it was begun, the people finishing the job had any clue about what those who started it were trying to accomplish.

And so it’s impossible to say with any degree of certainty that what you might do there had any resemblance to what it was designed to be for. And certainly not in a crowd of ten thousand thousand people.

We do know it served as a cremation graveyard, as did many of the ancient sites of Britain, Ireland and the rest of the world for that matter. And it’s surrounded by other monuments to the dead, and countless undiscovered burials. When the ancient Britons were building Stonehenge for their dead, the Egyptians were building the pyramids for theirs.

Woodhenge at Cahokia Mounds, Pagan Holidays Litha — The Woodhenge at Cahokia Mounds, near St. Louis. Woodhenges were also found in North America, similar to the one found at Durrington Walls near Stonehenge. The fact that the celestial observations attributed to Stonehenge could be done with much less effort, means that the main purpose of Stonehenge must have been something more important than determining the day of the summer or winter solstice. After all, the ancients would have had the ability to determine that simply by watching the path of the sun in the sky.

Pagan Holidays: Litha, and the problem with the Celts

The Celts reached Britain after Stonehenge was finished, and the Celtic culture which gave rise to Druids didn’t rise up till 300 BC, more than three thousand years after Stonehenge was begun.

Did the Druids use Stonehenge, as they found it? It’s possible, but there are no records of it, and more tellingly no archaeological record of it. Besides, Druids preferred the grove and the highlands to the open plain.

Also, Midsummer isn’t a Celtic holiday, and until the twentieth century, in Britain it wasn’t even considered a pagan holiday.

Was there a universal ancient pagan religion?

There was no ancient religion adhered to en masse in the British isles. There was no pagan religion standing opposed to encroaching Christians. Instead you had many religions based on an individual community’s needs, changeable at particular times, worshipping gods which we might not even recognize as gods today. When we find evidence of commonly recognized gods in ancient Britain, they tend to be northern European, not celtic.

In that, modern paganism does perhaps get it right. Modern paganism allows anyone to create their own religion. Just add incantations, the name of your favorite god and water. Shake well.

And in the process, neopaganism falls into the same trap as evangelical Christianity.

As religious fervor spread throughout Britain and the United States in the 18th and 19th century, the reins that tried to hold Christian beliefs in place started to slip. By the end of the 19th century, personal charisma overtook Biblical knowledge or insight, resulting in a religion strong on faith, but lacking in a firm foundation.

A person with enough charisma can spread an opinion until a large group of people accept it as a belief.

And so we believe the place to be to worship in the manner of our Celtic ancestors is Stonehenge, not because the historical evidence gives it any credit. But because popular writers write it, and enough people choose to believe it.

Wicca and Litha, and how the wheel of the year came to be

Then there’s paganism’s witchy relative, Wicca. The Wheel of the Year and pagan holidays, Litha specifically came in large part from Wicca’s founder, Gerald Gardner. He in turn was expanding on the work of Margaret Murray, then renowned for her book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.

Murray was one of the leading Egyptologists, among other things, but unfortunately, she wasn’t well schooled on European witches or the witch trials, transcripts of which she used extensively in creating her theory.

Her concept involved a branch of witchcraft which had gone pretty much unchanged and undetected throughout the centuries, and that a careful reading of the transcripts of the witch trials made it possible to understand their belief system. She listed the days sacred to witchcraft, based on an Irish king from the 10th century who wrote about the four Druidic fire festivals. These were held in February, May, August and November. Of those, May eve or Walpurgis, known in Britain as Roodmas, and All Hallow’s Eve were the two main ones, based on the activity of herdsmen, rather than agricultural.

Which is ironic considering the large number of vegetarians celebrating a way of life where survival, and sacred days depended on eating meat.

Murray might have known her shit when it came to Egypt, but she was out of her depth when it came to the history of her own country. Though most historians disagreed with her book, they had enough respect for her work in Egypt and other subjects, that they held their fire for the most part. It was only after her death that they tore her theory to shreds and by then her story of a surviving witch cult had stuck.

Gerald Gardner expanded on that notion, making the claim that he had met up with this cult which led to his part in the Bricket Wood coven. According to Wiccan legend, the current wheel of the year and the pagan holiday Litha came into being as a compromise between Gardner and Ross Nichols, head of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids. Their goal was to create a codified system of sabbats, and in the process increase the number of celebrations which made the new religions more sociable and, well, fun. In short, they were looking to create a more social spiritual path, and in so doing, fudging the facts, dispensing of the ancient knowledge that didn’t fit their scheme.

The current naming of the holidays occurred around 1974, and I’m sorry, but I have a problem with any religion whose official names of sacred days is younger than myself.

Traditional celebrations of pagan holidays, Litha and others

Are there any ancient traditions associated with the pagan holiday Litha? In parts of Europe there are fire celebrations on Midsummer, but it should be noted, even when evidence exists that these occurred in pagan times, it wasn’t a celebration of the witch. Instead if there were witches involved, the fire was meant to keep them away, not something for them to join in on.

In Britain these can’t be definitively placed before the 13th century, and it’s entirely possible they are based on Christian tradition, rather than pagan custom. Certainly it wasn’t handed down from the builders of Stonehenge. If the Celts and Druids worshipped at Stonehenge, they were simply doing what Pagans accuse, somewhat derisively, what Christians do, which is making religious sites of those who came before them their own.

Knowlton circles — The Norman church inside the henge at Knowlton, Dorset. Christianizing pagan sites is one of the practices pagans still hold against Christianity, but if there had been Druids worshipping at Stonehenge, or even the modern pagan celebrations held there, a similar accusation applies to them as well. In reality, this could also be said of those who modified Stonehenge in the latter phases, including the adding of the surviving standing stones.

Why does all this matter to the pagan community?

As in the case of the evangelical Christian who follows a leader based on charisma, (or something that just feels right), a lot of pagans accept what they’re told in a book or lecture as fact, and there are a lot of charlatans out there. As the Bible says, beware false prophets.

Margaret Murray’s theory of an existing witchcraft cult has been thoroughly debunked. Gerald Gardner drew on her work, and others in a way that created a system not based on ancient truths, but at best, an attempt to create a new religion, familiar but more palatable to modern tastes. There also those who make the case, and not without evidence, that Gardner was also driven by human ambition, ego and quite possibly, the desire for fame and wealth. He was perhaps one of the first wealthy lay ministers who founded his own congregation, after all.

Those who have come afterwards, whose thoughts shape modern paganism almost always have a commercial element. Wicca and modern paganism are two of the first religions whose evangelical needs have from the beginning, been for profit. It can easily be argued that most who become involved do so not from other believers, but from purchasing a book.

So how to celebrate the pagan holidays Litha and others?

How do you adhere to the old ways when the old ways were never written down and impossible now to ascertain?

Paganism is indeed a nature religion. But it wasn’t practiced in ancient times by people heading to the countryside eight times a year. It was practiced by people who lived in a way where the line between nature and civilization was incredibly thin. Choices we face today, like choosing to be a vegetarian wasn’t a moral decision, it was life and death. These were a people who regularly practiced animal sacrifice, and the occasional human as well. The gods they worshipped demanded these things, and who is to say that when you call the name of those gods now, they don’t demand the same?

Yes, the ancient gatherings were community gatherings. But each member of the community had a job to do. If they failed in theirs, the whole community could collapse. The weak were a drain on the whole. There can be no doubt it was a brutal way of life, so far removed from the free spirited celebrations at Stonehenge as to be unrecognizable.

These people weren’t just remembering their ancestors, they were bringing them out of their grave and celebrating right beside their remains.

A lot pagans fall into the category of “spiritual but not religious.” But they idealize ancient ways where the punishment for not believing was either death or being ostracized and pushed outside of the community, in a time and place where that quite often meant death as well. Our clear cut moral codes, liberal or conservative differ greatly from their beliefs, and it’s hard to see how you can reconcile the two.

There is a great body of evidence that the Celt not only condoned homosexuality, but promoted it as a preferred way of life. Which should resonate with the LGBTQ community. Except to accept that part of their society means also accepting the concept that slavery, as well as human sacrifice is acceptable as well, just as accepting the good of Christianity also means accepting those passages of the Bible which we find abhorrent today.

That was the crux of the ancient pagans. They believed, and worshipped however they needed at the moment to survive. Because to them nature wasn’t a benevolent mother goddess, or randy horned god. Nature was certain death if you were exposed to it without means of survival. And you didn’t just pray for a bountiful crop, but also the death of your enemies.

To glean the good from a culture and ignore the evil is to yearn for a golden age which never existed, and that urge is as old as history.

One of the pagan goddesses we know was worshipped in Britain was Minerva, here shown in a gold mask from the Roman occupation, found in Bath.

So what is a traditional Midsummer solstice celebration?

Midsummer is a traditional time for gatherings of the community, but it’s just as traditional in your own living room as at Stonehenge. The crops are in the ground and it’s a chance to take a short break and rest before the hard work of tending to the fields and the harvest takes place. It’s a time to pray that nature is kind this year, and brings enough sun, and enough rain – though not too much, to make it all work, and that the community survives.

Stonehenge was an amazing accomplishment, but in the end, we know almost nothing about it. Those who built it had disappeared long before Caesar set foot on the island. We’ll never know exactly why it was built, and how it worked. We don’t need to, but at the same time, we don’t need to invent meaning simply to have a place to have a pagan party twice a year.

Most of all, if you want to invent your own spiritual path, it’s your choice to do so. All too often, pagans are as derisive about Christians as the Bible thumpers are about the heathens. As the Bible says, and both sides should remember, if you live in glass houses ….

What is Halloween? On visitations by the dead, a bit of necromancy, sixties trick or treating in in drag, and a seismic switch in films that changed Halloween forever

October 30, 2018 By Todd Atteberry Leave a Comment

What is Halloween?

A look at Halloween traditions of the past

What is Halloween and why the focus on the dead? It’s a boon to necromancers, the day when the dead are most inclined to rise up and join us in the world. Perhaps all it takes is a little pull from this side, and of course, the right date.

Halloween is a part of Hallowtide, a three day observance of the Catholic church – All Hallow’s (or Saint’s) Eve, All Saint’s Day and All Soul’s Day. It was three days set apart for remembering the dead.

There are those who believe Halloween originated in Samhain, an Irish celebration of the end of the harvest, and that it became Christianized by the church to hide its pagan roots. Others believe Halloween developed separately, but it’s hard to hide the influence that the Irish and other Celtic people had on the celebration. For them, there was a focus on the dead as well.

In some areas of the Celtic lands at least, Samhain, like Hallowtide was a three day holiday, and it’s believed without firm evidence that when Pope Gregory moved the date of All Saints Day from May 13 to November 1st, that it was an attempt to Christianize the pagan celebrations then going on. But it would be another four centuries before Halloween really came into its own as a holiday.

It wasn’t just the Irish, but nearly all the lands occupied by the Celts which celebrated October 31, albeit under different names. Halloween is most certainly a Christian name. Except by modern reckoning, taking into consideration the change in the calendar, the proper date would now be November 7, halfway between the equinox and the solstice, or what’s known as a quarter day. The Celts’ celebrations began at sunset, which certainly matches Halloween’s timing.

But it could be that the actual date is further into November. A few centuries ago, the constellation known as the Pleiades was directly overhead at midnight on Halloween. It matches the timing of some of the earliest notations of Samhain celebrations. And it’s a sign that even the dead couldn’t miss. Not every medieval farmer was an astrologer. Farmers aren’t known for figuring time down to the hour and day. Unless there’s something visible. This is a sign which is easy to spot even now. It would have been hard to miss to someone whose survival depended on knowing the seasons and the weather.

Early American architecture bore more than a passing resemblance to the medieval architecture of Europe, which made the old ghost stories and legends which came over with immigration feel more at home. Pictured, the House of Seven Gables, Salem, Massachusetts.

What is Halloween? The thinning of the veil

Now matter how you figure the date, it was believed that on this day the boundary between this world and the otherworld was thinnest, and fairies and otherworldly denizens, who were thought be the remnants of the old gods could cross over. Since their protection was essential for humans and livestock alike surviving the winter, food and drink were set out for them. In addition, it was believed the dead came home for the night, and quite often a plate would be set for their ghosts. After the meal it was time to celebrate.

Hence the practice of bobbing for apples. Foretelling the future was a popular event on this night, particularly how it related to death and marriage. Originally, the apples used for bobbing had initials carved on them, and the one you pulled out bore the initials of the person you were going to marry.

As time wore on, the fear of the dead grew stronger, and rather than welcoming them, bonfires were built to keep them away, a remnant perhaps of the old tradition, which still hung on in places, of carrying torches around the fields to represent the sun which was now dying in the sky. When you reach the fourteenth century, belief in ghosts and witches were tainted by Christianity. Instead of seeing them as natural phenomenon, they were seen as demonic or anti Christian. What was once looked at as a mystery was now seen as something to fear.

Bobbing for apples is a Halloween tradition stretching back centuries. Originally the apples would have initials carved on them, and the one you selected would have point to the one you would marry. Halloween, and Samhain before it has long had a history of being the ideal time for divination practices.

What is Halloween? Trick or treating

Guising, as well as mumming had been known since at least the 1500s, and was the practice of dressing in costumes and knocking on doors, providing a bit of entertainment in exchange for food. This was the precursor in all likelihood to trick or treating. In some areas, this incorporated dressing as the dead, or in a way which represented the dead.

In Scotland and Ireland, the habit of adding tricks came into play during the seventeenth century. These people were mimicking the evil or dangerous sprits and the mischief they heaped upon the living. As they went door to door, they carried lanterns made from turnips which had carved faces to show a candle inside, what became today’s jack o’ lanterns.

It was Britain which gave Halloween its name. And ironically, Britain was one of the first countries to bail on celebrating Halloween. This occurred in 1647 when Parliament banned all celebrations which bore the stamp of Catholicism.

What is Halloween? Folk traditions that never died

So well before the twentieth century when America took it over and commercialized it, the practice of trick or treating, telling the future and of course, celebrating and fearing the dead was in place. And had been for centuries. Halloween celebrations in one name or another had been going on long enough that the actual day it was supposed to be celebrated fell a week or more later in the calendar.

It is said that Halloween came to America in the mid nineteenth century along with the Irish fleeing the potato famine. But as with all things Halloween, that’s a generalization.

The problem with generalizations is that they are usually over simplifications of complicated practices. Medieval Europe, where most Halloween traditions originated was populated with an illiterate people. There was no single book spreading holiday traditions, and as Halloween appears to have originated in harvest celebrations, communities often developed their own celebrations. Some stuck and spread, others died away.

So there is no codified version of Halloween which all others grew from. Instead Halloween, like most other celebrations and holidays developed alongside but separately according to where you lived, and when you lived there.

The tie that binds them all? The connection with the dead.

What is Halloween? To many it’s harvest celebrations, and the first piece of American literature to combine those traditions with what would become folk horror was the Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving. Each October, the Sleepy Hollow Storyteller, Jonathan Kruk tells the tale in the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow, where the story reaches its conclusion and where Washington Irving found his inspiration. The simplicity and perfection of the presentation hearkens back to older Halloween roots and results in each performance being a sell out.

What is Halloween? That depends on who is asking

I grew up in this house. I was gone for decades and find myself back here. I sleep in my childhood bedroom. Or rather my teenage bedroom. I don’t sleep in the one I slept in when I was younger. There are ghosts in there.

What is Halloween? You strip away the candy and costumes, you get back to the roots and it’s the dead, crossing back over into this world, even if just for a night. I might be of the last generation to see Halloween for what it was. I was at the tail end of a superstitious generation, which was at the tail end of human history in that regard. When people were more likely to believe in something unknowable. Whether it was ghosts or gods or both.

What caused this seismic shift in how the world saw the otherworld? I blame it on the movies

Across the road from Mr. Kruk’s performance is Horseman’s Hollow, on the grounds of Philipsburg Manor which also figures into Washington Irving’s tale of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The presentation there takes on a more ghastly tone, more befitting the modern age of horror, and results in thousand of people making their way through the maze of terror each night. The two events are a perfect example of the change that’s come over Halloween in the past forty or fifty years.

What is Halloween? A time for horror films

It was downstairs in the front parlor. The living room we called it. I was four or five years old and the family was gathered around the TV set on a Sunday night. There was a movie on, The Haunting. I had never heard of ghosts. I sat surrounded by my two older sisters, and my mom and my dad as we watched this. They thought they needed to protect me, but I didn’t understand enough to be afraid really. At least not at first. Not till I went to bed.

It was a new kind of horror film, as much psychological as traditional horror. My whole family was terrified, though I thought the experience rather fun. Dad wouldn’t even go to the basement to collect the laundry from the dryer. Then again, the basement did, and still does resemble a dungeon.

That night as I went up to bed I looked out the window at the top of the stairs. There on the lawn was a hooded figure, looking up at me. I didn’t know what it was. I had just learned about ghosts and you never saw ghosts in that film. I thought it was my grandpa, who I had been with that afternoon, coming back for some reason. But I never saw my grandpa dressed like that.

It wasn’t the last time I saw it. The next time I saw it I knew what it was. I had learned more about ghosts in the interim. It popped up at various time, just to my right once from where I write this as a matter fact, coming up the steps as I sat bolt upright in bed listening, then for that brief instant seeing it pass the open door.

Halloween was the one day of the year dedicated to that feeling, the moment of dread and horror to be in the same place with a ghost. It’s one thing to go looking for them. It’s another thing altogether to have them come looking for you.

I was a teenager when the first Halloween film came out. Michael Myers wasn’t a ghost. He was deranged. It was really a crime drama up till the end, when a supernatural element was introduced. It seemed nothing more than shock value at that point. Because by the end of that film, movie goers were no longer frightened by the dead in films. They were frightened of dying a sudden and violent death.

That was the seismic change in horror films. It was that fear of pain, of dying that usurped the role of ghouls in our collective fear. Vampires eventually became objects of romantic longing. The wolfman became native American. Whereas in the book version of Frankenstein the fear was of creating something that only God had the power to do, by the time of films it became the monster that was terrifying. Frankenstein films were around from the beginning of the film industry. So perhaps the seeds of the Halloween franchise was sewn in the beginning.

As we became a more rational people, we lost the fear of the supernatural. Are people afraid during the ghost hunting shows of today? Those who act in them seem less afraid of ghosts, and merely afraid of being startled by them. They confront them, instead of shrinking from them.

It makes me wonder if they’ve really ever seen one.

Once you have your life changes. It doesn’t matter that people tell you ghosts don’t exist. You know they do. You know there is more to this world than meets the eye. Nothing is ever the same after that.

What is Halloween? Costumes and trick or treating. I was five in this photo, and my mother had made my sisters’ dresses for a celebration of our home town’s founding. A few years later she put me in one, and sent me out into the dark to trick or treat. Behind a veil, no one could know who I was. If I spoke I gave up the ghost, so to speak, that I was in fact a boy. So I was reduced to knocking on doors and being silent, which seemed to creep out some people. Nearly as much wandering the dark streets in drag disturbed me as well.

What is Halloween? On trick or treating in drag in the Bible belt during the sixties.

What is Halloween? Costumes of course. And for parents in the sixties, that often meant being creative to save money.

There was a celebration our town had which required my mother to make my two sisters pioneer dresses, complete with bonnets. For whatever reason, for Halloween that year my mother decided I should wear one of the dresses. She sewed a veil over my face from the bonnet so no one could see I was actually a boy. Or even know who I was. If I spoke, they’d know I wasn’t a girl.

It’s Halloween and I’m less than ten years old, walking the streets of my hometown in a dress. At the time, it was alright to trick or treat alone. People ask who I am when I knock at their doors, but I’m a bit ashamed to be dressed like a girl. It wasn’t homophobia or anything like that. Gay issues had yet to arrive in my hometown in that part of the sixties, at least with kids my age.

We didn’t trick or treat in groups for safety. We weren’t afraid of getting abducted or molested. Our fears were something different. It was Halloween, the night that ghosts walk the earth.

What is Halloween? Razor blades in the pumpkin

What is Halloween? Trick or treating and dreading finding razor blades in apples.

When I was six or seven years old something occurred to break it. There had been rumors before about poison treats, but those were urban legends. Then the horror stories changed to razor blades and needles inserted into apples and other treats. I still believe it was a hoax perpetuated by either kids who wanted more brand name candy, or the candy makers themselves. Perhaps it was an isolated case or two which started the rumors, but regardless of where the stories came from, they grew like wildfire.

In reality it almost never happened and the injuries which did occur were very minor. It would be almost twenty years before it actually became a big problem. That killed trick or treating. The fear went from fear of the dead, to fear of the people whose doors you knocked on. It was only a matter of time before horror films caught up to the change.

The idea that you were given treats showed that the real fear was supposed to be the people living in the house, afraid of what stood at the door. From that point on that idea was turned on its head. As a result, centuries old traditions were broken. Fears which live in the imagination were supplanted by a more material fear … of pain and death.

Halloween had always relied on the imagination for its chills. From this point on, fear would take the same turn as horror films did later. We have to believe in something to fear it. As a society, we stopped fearing anything worse than death. It doesn’t mean that’s true. It just means we lost our imaginations.

My kid never knew the thrill of walking darkened streets, approaching an unknown house with its light on, knocking on the door, not knowing what to expect when it opened. He never heard his footsteps on the sidewalk, crunching through the leaves in some part of town he’d never been in, when just because you couldn’t see anyone there that didn’t mean you walked alone.

Halloween gave us a chance to confront our fears of the unknown, of the unknowable and conquer them. Or give in to them if that was all we could muster.

What is Halloween? Sunnyside celebration in Irvington. — What is Halloween? At Washington Irving’s house, Sunnyside, on Halloween there’s more of a traditional Autumnal celebration. The headless horseman is around of course, but he’s secondary to kid friendly storytelling, costumes and games.

What is Halloween today?

Without that core belief, that Halloween was the time when the dead walked the earth, Halloween has hno meaning other than the commercial. The church has seemed to give up on making their holiday a living tradition. In the rest of society, costumes aren’t usually ghost, ghouls, goblins and witches. They’re popular characters from movies and TV shows. Visual puns where once sincerity gave the holiday its meaning.

We compartmentalize. The autumn harvest celebration tradition which went hand in hand with Halloween has been delegated to its own celebration, and stripped from Halloween, robbing the holiday of much of its richness. Occasionally a new film will appear this time of year, based on the supernatural. This year it’s the Netflix series of The Haunting of Hill House. Very well done albeit shady in its pilfering of another artist’s work for its own end. But it does hearken back to the older traditions, while most of the field of horror is still what in the sixties would have been called a thriller, just with more blood, guts and brains. Zombies are big because we can watch the carnage without feeling guilty. After all, what kind of person can enjoy watching another person’s brains spilled? But since they’re zombies, not living people, it’s alright.

No, it’s not. It’s the same, just with an illusionary trick to convince yourself it’s fun to watch other people tortured. It’s human nature after all. Being hung, drawn and quartered was a public event. The guillotine in the French Revolution attracted massive crowds. We love our blood sports to this day. We just have to convince ourselves we’re better, more advanced than we were in the past.

Since the advent of motion pictures we’ve become a more visual society. Why read and imagine when we can watch and see? Why indeed? Because when we use our imagination we feel things stronger. The family that sat around the tv watching The Haunting in 1965 was frightened in a way that can’t be replicated today, because it’s harder for us to put ourselves in their shoes. The revised series shows the ghosts, whereas in the original, we created the ghosts in our imagination.

When Frankenstein was written, the horror was what happened with Victor Frankenstein, who tried to take on the role of God and paid dearly for that. By 1931 and the film version of the story, the horror was the monster, the belief in God no longer so strong or prevalent. In the even more modern retellings, the horror is the way the monster is treated by society. Along the way the whole premise of the story, and the source of the horror has been metamorphosed.

What is Halloween? Devil Worshippers. — Devil worshippers, or actually actors at Horseman’s Hollow in Sleepy Hollow, New York

What is Halloween? The decline of the role of religion in horror

Much of gothic horror dealt with the loss of one’s soul. The fastest growing segment of religion today are those who consider themselves spiritual but not religious. People are put off by the strict guidelines sat down by organized religion. We don’t like being told we’ll suffer damnation for our sins, so we’ve dispensed of hell. When that goes, where is the horror of life after death? Ghosts are more frequently seen now as imprints, rather than spirits with consciousness. Demons are all but delegated to mythology. Possession is mental illness. We are a rational people, in love with science and superstitions are seen as quaint. We don’t need to protect ourselves from fairies, from demons or from ghosts. Science has proven to itself that they don’t exist, so if we do find ourselves afraid, we can dial back the terror by reminding ourselves of that.

Halloween is now the one day we can pretend we believe, with tongue firmly in cheek. It simply doesn’t work when the other 364 days of the year we don’t believe. It’s no different from the person who is charitable on Christmas and a miser the rest of the year.

You either believe or you don’t.

The decline of classical horror coincided with the decline of Christianity. Even Jesus spoke of, and taught about dealing with ghosts and demons. As he’s become more humanized, the esoteric sides of his spirituality, and our belief in such things have declined.

Simply put, it takes more to scare us now, because we’ve become a bit arrogant in our beliefs. Ghost hunting is done by technology, rather than personal intervention. Does a meter reading or EVP convince anyone of belief in life after death?Likely not.

What convinced generation after generation of its existence was in large part, the imagination. We took what we were taught and let our imaginations run with it. It wasn’t the footsteps of a maniac following us in the dark on Halloween that frightened us. It was our footsteps, alone in the dark, on the one night of the year where we shared the path with those who came before us that filled us with dread, and on occasion, terror.

And it was our imaginations which brought it all to life.

Pondering why landscapes become sacred and the mysteries of the Uffington White Horse, Uffington Castle and White Horse Hill

May 31, 2018 By Todd Atteberry Leave a Comment

A month ago I stood atop a long barrow on White Horse Hill, with the grass covered chalk walls of Uffington Castle behind me, the galloping Uffington White Horse below me, and pondered a question for which there is no answer. What makes a landscape sacred?

Is sacred the right word? Mystic perhaps. What makes certain places cry out to be treated with reverence, to inspire the imagination of the soul?

If you keep a good step, you can probably walk from Uffington to Avebury and its stone circles and ancient wonders in a day or so. If you keep to the high ground, the tops of the ridges you’ll find yourself at times on the Ridgway, now a national trail, dedicated in 1972. But its origins are ancient.

Walking the Ridgway on Overton Hill, near Avebury. Tree covered barrows are visible to the right.

The idea is simple – by keeping to the tops of the ridges which stretch across southwest England, you avoid the mess and the hassle of walking below … no crossing rivers or heavy forests to get lost in and of course, the mud of Britain’s incessant rain. These highlands were above the tree line, often on a bed of chalk, which is more agreeable to walk on than mud.

You can see for miles, so it’s harder to be taken by surprise. They were taking these routes five thousand years ago, and for millennia they were some of the most important arteries flowing through the countryside.

Some of the earliest man made landmarks along the Ridgeway were the mounds, barrows and long barrows built for the dead. These weren’t wholesale cemeteries, but private tombs for a chosen few. It was in the shadow of these tombs and the Ridgway itself that Avebury, the largest of Britain’s stone circles was built.

Approaching the causeway enclosure on Windmill Hill near Avebury

It’s believed that the significance of Avebury as a location begins with the causeway enclosure atop Windmill Hill. Causeway enclosures typically consist of concentric ditches in a roughly circular pattern, with an earthwork bank. Crossing these circles are wide causeways, hence the name.

These are large ditches, and along with the chalk and soil, they mixed the bones of their ancestors, creating a connection between a people and the land.

Long barrows came along about the same time as causeway enclosures. West Kennet Long Barrow at Avebury coincides with the activities at Windmill Hill. Those activities involved the dead, indeed could have been in large part dedicated to their ancestors. It’s thought that the bones from West Kennet were brought to Windmill Hill for these celebrations.

West Kennet Long Barrow, Avebury World Heritage Site, Wiltshire, Great Britain

West Kennet Long Barrow was in use in one way or another for almost a thousand years. In that time, about 400 years after its construction, they started work on Stonehenge. Just after that they started building down below what is now Avebury circle and henge. It was an ambitious project and they kept coming up with new ideas, so it was over 600 years in construction.

But it all started with mounds and the dead.

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White Horse Hill

Wayland’s Smithy connected in legend with the Uffington White Horse nearby, Neolithic Chambered Long Barrow, 3400 BC, Ashbury, Oxfordshire. Great Britain. Todd Atteberry, artist

I’m walking the Ridgway between the neolithic long barrow known as Wayland’s Smithy, climbing up towards Uffington Castle. Wayland’s Smity is roughly the same age as West Kennet Long Barrow, also with a megalithic forecourt, and one of the earliest features of landscape around White Horse Hill.

The trail is fairly wide and well packed, likely more so than in ancient history. These neolithic highways were still in use through the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, through the dark ages, and the medieval era. Eventually, during the seventeenth century, banks were added, hedges were planted alongside much of their routes, enclosing the walkway to prevent livestock from getting into the fields.

In the earliest days, the lands below the paths would have been wooded, with the ridges rising above. Today I’m walking up towards one of those ridges, the highest spot in Oxfordshire. It’s raining, or misting perhaps. As you climb it’s hard to tell which because of the wind. Though not incredibly steep, it’s steep enough and I’m cursing that first cigarette that found its way between my lips. Coming from the flatlands of America, and being an idiot and smoking far too long, it’s a curse I utter frequently in Britain.

At the top of this ridge is Uffington Castle. When you hear the name you think stone, but Uffington Castle is a hillfort. HIllforts are typically found on the high ground, along the ridges which is why they’re frequently encountered along the Ridgway. These often starting coming about late in the Bronze Age or even the Iron Age. By this time the great complexes of Avebury and Stonehenge were abandoned.

At the beginning of the modern age, many of these locations were forgotten almost entirely.

A henge has nothing to do with stones. It’s an easy mistake for Americans because most, typically all of our knowledge of the word comes from Stonehenge. Aliens built it, yes?

The inside of Bratton Camp, a hillfort near Bratton, Wiltshire, also home to a somewhat later white horse. In the center a long barrow is visible

A henge is a circular walled enclosure, built up of dirt or chalk, with a ditch on the inside of the enclosure. It’s thought that the ditch being on the inside meant that it wasn’t constructed for defensive purposes. A defensive structure would be more effective with the ditch on the outside, which is what you find with hillforts. So it was that hillforts were believed to be defensive in nature, though over time archaeologist and sociologists have shown that in reality, some had little or no defensive purpose.

Uffington Castle began its life as a causeway, another sign on the ancient landscape. It’s not known whether this causeway was enclosed, or ran for some distance, perhaps to Wayland Smithy or beyond. Next to the causeway was a long barrow, with other smaller barrows in the vicinity.

This was in the Neolithic period, which predated the Bronze age. It’s impossible to know exactly what something like a causeway was intended to be used for. What we do know however, is that it took quite a few people, social organization and a good amount of free time to build these things. They didn’t come into existence on a lark.

Imagine a family or small tribe traveling the Ridgeway in the Neolithic period, who aren’t so far advanced from the hunter/gather stage, and have no qualms about taking over land others have already developed. They were bound to be humbled encountering a people who have built a structure that extends for miles. Uffington Castle’s white chalk walls could be seen atop the highlands by their builder’s enemies and was right along the Ridgway.

People would be more likely to want to join the community rather than rape, pillage and plunder. Perhaps in that way, the ancient landmarks were more defensive, in a more subtle way than is commonly believed. The best defense after all, is getting your enemies to become followers. Imagine how appealing having the kind of free time to build something like this would be to a people who are still struggling with day to day existence.

As is often the case, late in the bronze age it was decided to turn this causeway into a hillfort. And as so often the case, this was accomplished in stages.

It was about the time of the building of Uffington Castle, perhaps a bit before, that they had the idea to carve the horse into White Horse Hill.

The Uffington White Horse, visible along the top of the ridge to the left was never intended to be seen up close. Though there are a few land based locations to see the horse, it’s best viewed from above.

The Uffington White Horse
‘Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.
Before the gods that made the gods
Had drunk at dawn their fill,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was hoary on the hill.
Age beyond age on British land,
Aeons on aeons gone,
Was peace and war in western hills,
And the White Horse looked on.
For the White Horse knew England
When there was none to know.

The Ballad of the White Horse, from G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Vision of the King’

Britain is know for its hill figures, symbols cut into the highlands to be seen for miles. Cut into the grass exposing the chalk beneath, these symbols are as enigmatic as they are iconic. From the somewhat shocking Cerne Abbas Giant, to the Long Man of Wilmington, and the horses of Wiltshire and beyond, it’s easy to imagine that these have been in place since prehistory. The reality is most were created during recorded history with some notable exceptions.

One such exception is the White Horse of Uffington, the oldest of Britain’s hill figures. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 years old and the length of a football field. It can be seen clearly from 20 miles away, but it’s somewhat of a mystery, in that this figure seems to be less intended to be seen from the ground, but instead, skirting the top of the hillside, it best seen from above.

The White Horse of Westbury viewed from the top of Salisbury Plain. Like the Uffington White Horse, it’s built below a hillfort – Bratton Camp, and overlooks the same type of hill face as the Manger at Uffington. Perhaps the builders of the Westbury White Horse were struck by the similarities between the two locations?

Curious of course, as the people who built it had no way of seeing from above, best appreciated by the skylarks and buzzards circling overhead. To this day, nobody knows how these people could create this form, which can only truly be seen from miles away.

There are those that make the case that time and erosion have caused the horse to actually slip up the hill, and perhaps it was more visible at its creation. It’s certainly changed its appearance a bit. Aerial photography is supposed to show that it once bore more a resemblance to real horse than the stylized design we see now.

Of course there’s magic related to the White Horse. Stand in the eye and spin around three times as the clock turns while making a wish, and your wish will come true. Workers repairing the horse in the 1950s reported their foreman stood on a hill a quarter mile away to give suggestions, and was able to speak in a normal voice, which then carried along the hillside to the workers.

And at night, the White Horse and its foal come down from the hill and grazes in the Manger below.

Standing atop the barrow in my memory once more, I look down at the semi circular indention in the hillside below me. This is the Manger, a natural formation. On the western wing you have the Giant’s Stairs, terraces cut into the hillside that were the product of Ice Age shenanigans. Below me to my right is Dragon’s Hill, a natural formation but with a curiously flat top, famous in folklore, and might have been sculpted a bit by early man.

Standing atop the long barrow above the Uffington White Horse, overlooking The Manger, with the Giant’s Stairs to the left and Dragon Hill to the right, barely visible here but identifiable by its bald spot.

Once more I’m hit by the thought that I’m standing in a sacred place, and once more I’m reminded, it all started with the dead, the bones and the barrows.

This long barrow isn’t as elegant as Wayland’s Smithy, no sarsen stones along it sides, no megaliths guarding its entrance. Its only decorations now are the wild orchids that pop up occasionally on the grass at White Horse Hill, and the variety of butterflies which make their home there. It’s aligned northwest to southwest, is about 115 foot long and 30 foot wide, and it’s only about a foot tall. The ditches which ran along its side are long filled in, In the center is a depression from an excavation in 1857. During that trip into the mound, a cremation urn was found. All in all, about 46 skeletons were located, from various times throughout history.

After Uffington Castle was abandoned, the Romans seemed to have used it for a base. They also used the long barrow to bury their dead. Five of those burials had coins in their mouth, which dates them to late in the late Roman period. They filled the barrow with their dead, and an unknown amount of the ground around it as well. Many of the skeletons were found to be missing heads in later excavations, but it’s not known if those heads were taken in the previous dig.

There’s also evidence that the barrow was used during the Saxon period as well.

The ancient causeway seemed to terminate here at the long barrow, and it was here late in the late Bronze Age, sixth or seventh century BC, that the people of the area built the first phase of the hillfort, likely some time after the White Horse of Uffington was scoured into the hillside below.

That white horse is 360 foot long and stands 160 foot tall. It’s dug into the chalk of the hillside three foot deep, ten foot wide, and was probably picked out by wooden spades and antler picks. It was then filled in with chalk and rubble. Against the green of the hillside, visible for so many miles, it spoke out to anyone who could see it, “here are people.”

Beyond that, no one can say for sure what it means.

“Gerllaw tref Abinton y mae mynydd ac eilun march arno a gwyn ydiw. Ni thyf dim arno.” (Near to the town of Abinton there is a mountain with a figure of a stallion upon it and it is white. Nothing grows upon it.⁾Llyfr Coch Herbiest, The Red Book of Herbiest, 1375–1425

Some argue the Uffington White Horse marked the boundary, or at least the territory of a tribe, in particular the local Belgae tribe. Others point to the Dobunni, as the land below was a sort of no man’s land between their territory and Altrebates.

Its distinctive shape is similar to celtic coins which were in use prior to the Romans invading Britain. These coins were associated with Epona, a pre Christian goddess known in Celtic Britain as Rhiannon, connected to horses, and who represented fertility, healing and death.

Others connect it with sun worshippers and the belief that the sun was helped in its travels by a horse drawn chariot. It’s said that in midwinter the sun overtakes the White Horse of Uffington.

Dragon Hill, below the Uffington White Horse and steeped in folklore. Why there is a bald spot on top where grass will not grow is something of a mystery.

That it be dedicated to a sun god, dwelling above, or even Belenus who had a connection with horses, would make sense, as the best way to see the white horse is from the sky. So it’s hard to make the argument that it was created for a deity above, instead of those on the ground.

Others make the case that it’s not a horse at all, but a saber toothed cat, a dog or the most popular, a dragon.

On Dragon Hill below me, there’s a curious white patch on the flat surface of its flat top. It’s said that no grass grows there, and geologists agree, though can’t come up with a definitive answer for why.

For that we turn to folklore and Christians get in on the story. Dragon’s Hill is one of many sites in Britain which lay claim to where St. George had his famous duel with the dragon. It’s said that when he drove his sword into dragon’s breast, its blood spilling onto the ground bleached it white, and no grass will grow there ever again.

Another legend has it that Uther Pendragon died atop the hill fighting the Saxons,

But the best explanation for the bald patch is the high level of potash on top of the hill, where there is evidence that it was used quite often in the dim and distant past for ritual fires and sacrifices. Indeed, even into the Victorian era, pagans were using the hill for their ceremonies from the 17th to 19th centuries, culminating in 1857.

Uffington Castle

Behind me looms the banks of Uffington Castle. HIllforts are often imposing, even seen from a distance. There are less than a hundred of then across Great Britain, and are typically found on the southern part of the island. Like Uffington which started as a causeway, most had other uses before being converted into the basic designs we see now. Most were built in a 500 year period which ended around the end of the first century AD, which makes Uffington Castle one of the older hillforts.

The original Uffington Castle was a single circuit with entrances on the east and west side. This phase of construction was likely between 8-900 BC. It fell into disrepair somewhat rapidly, and was abandoned.

About four centuries later construction began again, with the ramparts being built up to a considerable height, and the ditch widened and deepened. The walls themselves would have been kept cleared of grass, and the white chalk would have been quite imposing and visible for miles. The inside of the walls were braced with timber and sarsen stone and the eastern entrance was blocked up.

There was also a wooden structure built about this time outside the walls, now only identifiable by post holes.

Archaeology can only do so much to identify what took place inside these enclosures. It was originally thought that hillforts were for defensive purposes, and that the insides would have been teeming with life. It’s true that some show signs of being used extensively. Trade was beginning to pick up as the agrarian lifestyle was forming communities. It was also at this time that skilled trades were becoming more common, metal working for instance during the Bronze and Iron ages, and in some cases hill forts were where these skilled laborers plied their trade, where commodities were brought to be bought and sold.

Others, such as Uffington Castle show very little signs of use, certainly very little occupational use. It’s now believed that these enclosures were used for rituals as well as celebrations.

Uffington Castle’s walls and ditch which are visible now were from a second rebuilding of the site in the Iron age. The Uffington White Horse is just to the right and below on the hillside.

I can’t help but wonder, given the relationship between the dead and their celebrations in the Neolithic period, how the memory was kept alive into the Bronze and Iron ages? Or did it spring up again after a period of absence? If so, that means the people of these later ages were able to identify the marks on the landscape as sacred. Whereas scholars from our own era mistook the later hillforts dedicated to ritual and celebrations, as defensive.

What crucial bit of visual knowledge did we lose, that leaves us unable to see the works of the past for what they were? The people of Bronze age Uffington were able to look at the signs on the earth and determine this was a holy place. When abandoned then rebuilt in the Iron age, the memory of this place was still intact, despite the fact that several generations had passed and there was no written record.

It was abandoned again in the middle Iron age and taken up by the Romans a century or so later. They made modifications which possibly included a temple. Others have pointed out that it could have been an open air temple on Dragon Hill. Regardless, the Romans were from a different culture altogether, but still recognized the sanctity of the place.

When the Saxons took over many generations later, they named the Wayland’s Smithy Long Barrow below Uffington Castle for one of their gods.

One piece of folklore about the Uffington White Horse is it flies to Wayland’s Smithy to be shod, a Neolithic Long Barrow named for a Saxon god.

Sometime between then and now, we lost the ability to read the signs.

Or was it lost? Pagans held rituals on Dragon Hill into the Victorian Era. Perhaps when it comes to identifying the sacred, or finding the purpose behind an ancient site whose purpose is long ago forgotten, these things are best done by non scholars, who might see the landscape with the right kind of vision.

Or perhaps folklore holds the keys to understanding, if we open our minds up enough to see it for what it is, storytelling with a grain of truth.

What of the tale that the horse flies across the sky to be reshod by the ancient god and ironsmith Wayland at his long barrow? Is this the Saxons identifying the horse as one who belongs in the sky, as an ancient belief in sun gods would indicate?

For who knows how long, people from the area gathered on White Horse Hill for a ritual known as the scouring of the horse. Within ten or fifteen years of neglect, the horse disappears. So every seven years the people would gather to clean and rechalk the figure. At times there were thousands of people participating in the event. They held fairs to go along with the scouring within the walls of Uffington Castle. The debris left from these later festivals bears a startling resemblance to the type of debris left after the ancient ceremonies.

The trappings of the ritual and the fair changed over time no doubt, but the concept likely has been there since the Uffington White Horse was first carved into the hill. When it was occupied by the Romans, the locals were still climbing the hill to keep the horse tidy.

Perhaps someday, some crackpot will look at a place like Uffington, Avebury, Stonehenge or countless other ancient mysteries and see the truth. Perhaps they already have, and we’re still waiting on the science necessary to prove it. Maybe it’s not archaeology that will finally solve these mysteries, but instead, visions.

And for that we can always be hopeful, for three thousand years after a people deemed the Uffington landscape sacred, it still inspires visions.

The hammer of the gods still ring out at Wayland’s Smithy, a long barrow chamber tomb nestled in a secluded grove in Oxfordshire

May 21, 2018 By Todd Atteberry Leave a Comment

The chambered tombs and long barrows of Britain have long tickled the imagination, and perhaps none more so than Wayland’s Smithy. Perhaps it’s the stand of beech trees enclosing it which makes it feel more intimate, more hushed. Unlike West Kennet Long Barrow near Avebury, sitting exposed to the wind and the rain, high on a ridge, Wayland’s Smithy can feel at once comforting, or oppressive, depending on one’s mood and perhaps the weather.

I visited it on a soft day, light rain falling in mid April. The trees had yet to fill out their branches with leaves, and when we arrived there was a family having a picnic near the entrance, as well as some hikers taking a rest at the back. It was already a tense day, so perhaps my mood was colored by that. I’d seen photos and in those it looked quite inviting, beautiful even in its pastoral beauty. On this day however, it felt more like what it is.

A tomb.

Wayland’s Smithy has many connections to literature and folklore, stretching back to the earliest long poem in Old English and the Saxon invasion. Sir Walter Scott named the tomb where the blacksmith worked as Wayland Smiths’ forge in his novel Kenilworth. In the Old English Beowulf, the hero’s breastplate was forged by Wayland, or Weland. In the translation to Old English of Boethius, often attributed to King Alfred, it is said that

Who knows now the bones
Of the wise Weland
Under what barrow
They are concealed.

Job Cork, a shepherd from the nearby village of Uffington, known for taking the stories of the old ones and putting them to rhyme wrote in 1807,

If you along the Rudgeway go,
About a mile for aught I know,
There Wayland’s cave then you may see,
Surrounded by a group of trees.

They say that in this cave did dwell
A smith that was invisible;
At last he was found out, they say,
He blew up the place and vlod away.

To Devonshire then he did go,
Full of sorrow, grief and woe,
Never to return again;
So here I’ll add the shepherd’s name –

The idea that the ruins which confronted 19th century visitors to Wayland’s Smithy were caused by the destruction of the forge of a pagan god stretches back to the days before Christianity replaced pagan beliefs, as the story of Wayland the Smith dates at least to the tenth century.

The antiquarian John Aubrey, writing in Monumenta Britannica, about 1670, wrote about Wayland’s Smity, “about a mile [or less] from the Hill [White-Horse Hill] there are a great many large stones, which though very confused, must yet be laid there on purpose. Some of them are placed edgwise, but the rest are so disorderly, that one would imagine, they were tumbled out of a cart.”

Sarsen stones and dry stone walls at the entrance to Wayland’s Smithy

Wayland’s Smithy is a Neolithic long barrow and chamber tomb, nestled inside a grove of beech trees, near Whitehorse Hill in Oxfordshire, not far from the village of Ashbury. It sits just off the Ridgway, one of the ancient tracks of Neolithic Britain, upon which people used to move throughout the countryside. It sits just downhill from the Iron Age Uffington Castle, a breathtakingly situated earthwork hillfort, and the more famous Uffington White Horse.

Wayland’s Smithy was constructed in two phases, a short time apart, the first being built between 3590 and 3555 BC. Britain, perhaps following the lead of their continental counterparts was moving at the time from hunter gatherers to farmers, and a more pastoral lifestyle somehow prodded the Neolithic people to construct impressive houses for their dead.

Much has been made about astronomical alignments in the construction of prehistoric British monuments. The long barrow of Wayland’s Smithy runs north and south, with two burial chambers flanking the main passage, aligned east and west. Technically, it’s a bit off center, which might have had some relevance, as the second phase of construction kept the original alignment.

The first phase of construction of Wayland’s Smithy was built on slabs of sarsen stones, and consisted of a narrow, lidded wooden box, in which the remains were placed. At either end were two tree trunks, split in two and placed upright, which have been interpreted as the supports for a roof like structure over the box containing the cadavers. Nearby, post holes provide evidence for a platform which might have been used to expose the bodies to the elements, quickening decomposition and reducing them to bones prior to burial. Fourteen sets of remains were found, eleven men, two women and a child, and some at least appeared to have been buried intact, with at least tendons and cartilage holding the bones together.

One body was found to be interred in a crouching position. The others were stacked like a cord of wood, though as noted, quite likely devoid of flesh and reduced to bones. Three of the bodies might indicate death in combat, though it’s debated whether the arrowheads were lodged first in the body and exposed by decomposition, or added later as previously thought, as grave offerings. Two of the bodies appeared to have been partially eaten by scavengers prior to burial, also pointing to the possibility of death in battle.

The life span of this first phase of Wayland’s Smithy appears to have been only about fifteen years, something within the time frame of 3590-3550 BC. It’s also possible, if not especially likely, that it was used for as short a time as a single year. Afterwards, an oval mound was built over the complex consisting of chalk extracted from ditches dug on either side, completely burying it.

The original construction of Wayland’s Smithy lies buries about halfway down the length of the long barrow.

“It was one of those long barrows, which we meet with occasionally, having a kistvaen of stones within it, to protect the place of interment. Four large stones of a superior size and height to the rest, were placed before the entrance to the adit, two on each side ; these now lie prostrate on the ground : one of these measures ten and another eleven feet in height ; they are rude and unhewn, like those at Abury. A line of stones, though of much smaller proportions, encircled the head of the barrow, of which I noticed four standing in their original position ; the corresponding four on the opposite side have been displaced. The stones which formed the adit or avenue still remain, as well as the large incumbent stone which covered the kistvaen, and which measures ten feet by nine. “

Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Ancient Wilts.,1821

About a half century later, about 3460 and 3400 BC, the people living in the vicinity of Wayland’s Smithy decided to revisit what came before, and built a larger, more elaborate structure over the top of the previous. What they built was a type of construction long known to this part of the country, and indeed on the way out, as Wayland’s Smithy is one of the last, and best preserved long barrow chamber tombs in Britain.

The long barrow was wedge shaped, a hundred and eighty feet long, forty eight feet wide at the front and twenty feet wide at the rear. It was built up with chalk to a height of ten feet and contained a main passage, with side chambers forming a prehistoric crucifix on the inside. The main passage was twenty two feet long and six foot high inside, with the side chambers being four and a half feet high. Two long ditches, fifteen foot wide and six foot deep flanked the sides, with sarsens set up as curbstones along the edges of the barrow. Split tree trunks were set upright along the ditches like totem poles from the native Americans.

But it’s the facade of Wayland’s Smithy that attracts attention. The front of the barrow had a dry stone retaining wall, and in front that stood six sarsen stones, about ten foot high. Today there are only four remaining, but the effect is still staggering.

The remains found in the second phase of building were more scattered and nearly impossible to learn much from. They found the skeletons of seven adults and a single child. Though it’s hard to say for sure if it was intentional, or just a freak coincidence, three leaf shaped arrows were found, each touching the pelvis bone of different bodies.

Dating of the remains found that the second phase of Wayland’s Smithy only lasted about a hundred years, before it was sealed off.

Though often thought to be intentional, the cause of the holes sometimes found in sarsen stones are in fact the result of geological forces, and were likely chosen by the builders for this unique characteristic. No one knows why.

Curiously, two Iron Age pieces of metal were found in the barrow, perhaps unfinished swords, or maybe bars used for currency. Either way, iron working become forever connected to the site in folk legends.

The first written mention of Wayland’s Smithy occurs in a charter dating from 955 AD, during the reign of the Saxon King Edred with refers to it as Weland’s Smithy.

The name seems to refer to a Saxon god, Wayland or Wolund, who was a smith, one who worked in metal. The Saxons who inhabited the area had no clue the site was already four thousand years old when they dedicated it to their own god.

Wayland, or Wolund wasn’t a particularly nice character. According to an old Norse poem,

He struck off the heads of those stalwart boys,
Under soot-blackened bellows their bodies hid,
From both their skulls he scraped the hair
And set them in silver as a sight for Nidud,
Of their eyes he fashioned excellent gems
For his dear neighbor, Nidud’s wife,
And out of the teeth which were in their mouths
He forged a brooch to bring Bodvild joy.

But in the folklore handed down to the recent past, Wayland actually proves to be quite helpful to the local inhabitants.

Francis Wise, an eighteenth century antiquarian composed a letter to one Doctor Mead in 1738, describing the folklore of Wayland’s Smithy. “At this place lived formerly an invisible Smith; and if a traveller’s Horse had lost a Shoe upon the road, he had no more to do, than to bring the Horse to this place, with a piece of money, and leaving both there for some little time, he might come again and find the money gone, but the Horse now shod. The stones standing upon the Rudge way as it is called; (which was the situation, that they chose for burial monuments) I suppose, gave occasion to the whole being called Wayland-Smith; which is the name it was always known by to the country people.

Sir Walter Scott used the folklore, name and setting in his novel Kenilworth, published in 1821. The character Richard Sludge speaks:

“But enough of that—here are we at Wayland Smith’s forge-door.”
“You jest, my little friend,” said Tressilian; “here is nothing but a bare moor, and that ring of stones, with a great one in the midst, like a Cornish barrow.”
“Ay, and that great flat stone in the midst, which lies across the top of these uprights,” said the boy, “is Wayland Smith’s counter, that you must tell down your money upon.”
“What do you mean by such folly?” said the traveller, beginning to be angry with the boy, and vexed with himself for having trusted such a hare-brained guide.
“Why,” said Dickie, with a grin, “you must tie your horse to that upright stone that has the ring in’t, and then you must whistle three times, and lay me down your silver groat on that other flat stone, walk out of the circle, sit down on the west side of that little thicket of bushes, and take heed you look neither to right nor to left for ten minutes, or so long as you shall hear the hammer clink, and whenever it ceases, say your prayers for the space you could tell a hundred—or count over a hundred, which will do as well—and then come into the circle; you will find your money gone and your horse shod.”

The young man with Sludge is dubious of his claims, and fears the loss of his money, and refuses to call to Wayland Smithy for service.

“Man or devil,” said Dickie, “I see that I must summon him for you;” and therewithal he whistled sharp and shrill, with an acuteness of sound that almost thrilled through Tressilian’s brain. “That is what I call whistling,” said he, after he had repeated the signal thrice; “and now to cover, to cover, or Whitefoot will not be shod this day.”

Tressilian, musing what the upshot of this mummery was to be, yet satisfied there was to be some serious result, by the confidence with which the boy had put himself in his power, suffered himself to be conducted to that side of the little thicket of gorse and brushwood which was farthest from the circle of stones, and there sat down; and as it occurred to him that, after all, this might be a trick for stealing his horse, he kept his hand on the boy’s collar, determined to make him hostage for its safety.

“Now, hush and listen,” said Dickie, in a low whisper; “you will soon hear the tack of a hammer that was never forged of earthly iron, for the stone it was made of was shot from the moon.” And in effect Tressilian did immediately hear the light stroke of a hammer, as when a farrier is at work. The singularity of such a sound, in so very lonely a place, made him involuntarily start; but looking at the boy, and discovering, by the arch malicious expression of his countenance, that the urchin saw and enjoyed his slight tremor, he became convinced that the whole was a concerted stratagem, and determined to know by whom, or for what purpose, the trick was played off.

Accordingly, he remained perfectly quiet all the time that the hammer continued to sound, being about the space usually employed in fixing a horse-shoe. But the instant the sound ceased, Tressilian, instead of interposing the space of time which his guide had required, started up with his sword in his hand, ran round the thicket, and confronted a man in a farrier’s leathern apron, but otherwise fantastically attired in a bear-skin dressed with the fur on, and a cap of the same, which almost hid the sooty and begrimed features of the wearer. “Come back, come back!” cried the boy to Tressilian, “or you will be torn to pieces; no man lives that looks on him.” In fact, the invisible smith (now fully visible) heaved up his hammer, and showed symptoms of doing battle.

View of the interior chambers of Wayland’s Smithy.

Of course, a remote, ancient burial chamber will be the source of ghost stories and sightings as well.

Children still reported hearing the sounds of hammering coming from Wayland’s Smithy, as recently as the nineteenth century. The Uffington White Horse was believed to leave his hillside on occasion to have new shoes at the long barrow.

A recent sighting spotted a figure on the track leading to Wayland’s Smithy, his feet and legs disappearing into mist. As the witness turned his head and then back to the mysterious figure, he found it had disappeared, vanished.

Feelings of being watched while at Wayland’s Smithy are common, as are oppressive feelings, weighing down upon visitors. Others, particularly those entering the chamber report a feeling of not being wanted in there.

Though the deity to whom the long barrow and burial chamber gives his name is long forgotten by most, people still remember to leave tokens for him, pushing coins into the cracks of they dry stone wall which lines the front of Wayland’s Smithy. The mystery of where those coins disappear to is easily solved however, as workers for The National Trust collect them and give them to local charities.

And in this way, the story of Wayland Smithy lives on, and the mysterious smith in the barrow still helps the locals to this day.

View a gallery of images of Wayland’s Smithy and Whitehorse Hill at Wytchery Art.

On pagan sexuality, getting laid in the seventies, the great god Pan, the Marquis de Sade and the mating habits of goats

February 8, 2018 By Todd Atteberry 1 Comment

Top: Statue of Pan, The Eagles Nest, Northport, Long Island

Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.
Marquis de Sade

I credit my parents with instilling in me a love for pagan sexuality.

Not intentionally – they didn’t advocate any kind of sex. It’s something that was only mentioned a couple times in high school. When I got caught doing it.

This is the last half of the seventies, in a small midwestern town. There wasn’t anything to do here for teenagers, so we had a lot of sex. There wasn’t anything for parents to do either, so our parents were always home. You weren’t allowed to be in each other’s bedrooms unless the doors were open and people nearby.

Most of the sex I had up till and even through college took place in nature. Usually in a car, deep in the country with real country dark. I can still see the full moon shining down through fogged up windows, her skin pale in the moonlight and utterly drunk on each other. By the age of eighteen I’d had far more sex in graveyards than I had in a house.

This was one of the golden ages of horror films. There’s been research into what horror films do to young people’s libido, but I don’t need to see it. The supernatural is a powerful aphrodisiac. The gothic among us find it with a dash of fear, velvet and candles and just the right music. The pagan among us find it in the most powerful of supernatural agents, the gods, and strip away all but that which is natural.

I’ve almost always been monogamous. I essentially had the same girlfriend all through high school, so we got to know each other very well. There wasn’t a lot of information about sex available to us. Our mother’s magazines were the most useful. Women were openly talking about sex, and sharing tips and techniques. This turned out to be a bonus for her, as there was for the first time, a focus on women’s orgasms. When you learn all you know about sex from a women’s point of view, it molds you in a certain way.

The monthly standard was Redbook. It was racier than Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Day, mom’s other regulars. Cosmopolitan was too saucy for our household, though mom had one stashed away in a drawer.

Dad had a copy of The Sensual Man hidden under the bed, which was about half as useful as Redbook. The best advice it gave was practice your tongue by rolling around a grape in your mouth. It might not have helped with technique, but it did get you to eat fruit, which is always good advice.

So we didn’t know much more than the basics, and it was hard to apply most of those techniques in the front seat of an Oldsmobile. Especially when you’ve got one eye out for approaching cars.

To learn what you were doing, you had to learn the other person. That was amazing. Having very few preconceptions about what sex was to most people, what we did was purely instinctual and natural. So nature seemed to be the natural setting for that.

It was on a hike in the Shawnee Forest, to a place called Cave Hill that I first heard that primeval song, a calling I’d never heard before.

Cave Hill hill rises to an elevation of between 500 and 900 feet. The trees are old, towering overhead and in a thick green canopy, with shafts of light raining down on you. It was also seldom visited at the time. It was spring and we debated going into the cave itself, as it’s near the beginning of the trail. But in May it can be very wet, and without some way of finding your way out, you could only go into the first one or two passages.

We set off for bluffs at the top instead. I assume we made it, likely had a lovely hike. It was a few decades ago, and I think it involved marijuana, so my memories are faint. Except for the memory of rolling around there on the mossy floor of the forest, which felt like the softest carpet imaginable. I don’t think we were ourselves that afternoon. Which shouldn’t have been a surprise as we were in the realm of Pan.

Rim Rock Trail, Shawnee National Forest, Southern Illinois

Swing your hips
Loose your head and let it spin
And we will look together for the Pan within
The Pan Within, Mike Scott

Pan is one of the most ancient gods. It’s believed he was around centuries before the Greeks added him to the new roster of gods they were assembling.

Pan is a rustic god, wild and uncivilized, but also one of the gods that give us music. Not the delicate music of the lyre though, but the wild folk music, music designed not just to make you dance, but to lose yourself in the dance. To dance with Pan is to strip away the tamed, the restrained and everything you’ve learned, layer by layer. Till by the end of the dance, you are who you are at your core, and you love the one you’re dancing with. There’s only one place that can go.

Only two temples dedicated to Pan have been discovered, one in the southwestern Peloponnese, now in ruins and in ancient Egypt at Apollonopolis Magna. For Pan was the god of the lonely, those living in the wilds, in the hinterlands away from civilization. You worshipped Pan where you found him, where he lived – in caves, in the forest, in the wild places.

It’s how we felt, trapped in the middle of nowhere, in little towns surrounded by the countryside. The country was where magic happened, where there were things unknown in the woods and in the night.

Pan is half man, half goat. The bottom half is the essential bit of this story. The mating habits and generally horniness of goats are legendary. Picking a mate relies heavily on scent, and you can learn a lot from scent, even if you’re not a goat. The male goat will urinate on his face, beard and neck, a scent humans find foul but makes a doe swoon. To drive the point home, Pan also has the horns of a goat, the other place where a goat’s scent glans are located.

If a female goat is interested, she’ll let the male goat approach and have a wee for him. He dips his nose in the stream then curls his lip up, breathing deeply to learn if she’s the one, and if this is the time. If so the ritual begins. Chasing, dodging, fighting off his advances, often into or even through the night, sometimes lasting a day and a half before she’s ready. When the male goat reaches fruition, he throws his head back and curls his lips. Other goats in the area watching can also go into heat, and it can turn into a goat orgy on occasion.

It’s easy to see why Pan has come to symbolize all he does. It’s the essence of human and animal sexuality rolled into one. The courtship is just as essential as the act itself.

He found us that afternoon on Cave Hill and directed our dance. Once you’d felt that, you knew instinctively how to find it again and again, in place after place. After that afternoon, the foggy windows were rolled down, car doors left open and sometimes you’d sneak a blanket out of the house.

Country graveyards are the best, remote and almost always nobody there. You were surrounded by nature, the sights, the sounds, the smells. There was life going on around you, animals crackling through the leaves of the forest floor, birds singing overhead, you weren’t alone. You were a part of what was going on, and to the creatures that stirred in those woods, no different than seeing two deers going at it.

That it had the added chill of death only added to the experience.

You can find Pan everywhere in nature, on the shores of a river, on the banks of a lake, in the meadows and forests. Curiously, we found him behind the statue of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in Hannibal, Missouri, in shadows that were surprisingly dark. There’a little room in the back of Cave In Rock if you want the full Pan experiences, the wet floor of the cave. My kid might well have been conceived up against the Martello tower at Glen Head, outside of Glencolumbkille in Ireland, the sea crashing far below us at the foot of the cliffs. When I first stepped into West Kennet Long Barrow at Avebury seventeen years ago I felt the horns begin to sprout on my head. A country chapel on a wooded hill, with saints and angels looking down upon us. I don’t recommend that one for casual encounters, because I’m sure if that particular god exists, you’re on a fast track to hell. I was banking on the wedding ring to make it alright in his eyes. I think Jesus would stand up for me on that one.

Because there’s something sacred about that kind of connection. It’s magical in a way that humans have sought for millennia.

Alastair Crowley sought it in depravity. The first practitioner of sex magic in the western world was Paschal Beverly Randolph, who took the opposite approach, writing in the nineteenth century that “The rite is a prayer in all cases, and the most powerful [that] earthly beings can employ…it is best for both man and wife to act together for the attainment of the mysterious objects sought.”

But what they preached required ritual, planning and rules, which okay, can be fun on occasion. But it’s not what Pan was all about.

Interest in Pan started growing in the late seventeenth century, and within a hundred years Pan had become a central character in the Romantic era. His behavior was toned town and taken to a metaphysical level, or even to children’s stories where he became Peter Pan.

But the freedom in his story, the sexuality, the wildness within him is perhaps best personified by a writer whose work went unnoticed till the twentieth century, the Marquis de Sade.

It’s easy to forget that Pan also promoted sexual violence. Echo refused all men, which angered Pan so much he encouraged his followers to tear her to pieces and scatter the bits across the earth. In comparison, perhaps the Marquis is nearly tame.

If you strip away the violence of Sade, which yes, is hard, you find a writer extolling the need for humans to get back to their basic self, before we became quite so civilized and so oppressed. He was promoting freedom through sexuality and imagination, and in what he wrote, he predated Freud by a hundred years. He also expresses a rather surprising feminist viewpoint when taken as a whole.

In an exhibition of Sade’s impact on visual artists, held at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, one of the curators, Laurence des Cars, was quoted as saying “His aim was to destroy every illusion surrounding human sexuality, be it historical, moral or religious, which inspired artists to look at the body in a new way.”

The Marquis’ work, once nearly forgotten is now a cherished part of French literature. The original manuscript for The 120 Days of Sodom, which he wrote in 1785 while imprisoned in the Bastille, recently fetched $9,000,000. Written on small bits of paper and glued together to form a long scroll so he could hide it in the walls of his cell, the writing is so small that one needs a magnifying glass to read it, and is now kept in a velvet lined, wooden box.

Detail of urn with Pan. Old Westbury Gardens, Long Island, New York

The imagination is the spur of delights… all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
Marquis de Sade

My girlfriend’s first orgasm was witnessed by our county sheriff and deputy, who turned their spotlight on us in a graveyard at just the right moment. My view was blocked by her and I thought it truly was one of those transcendent moments, because as she found her release she literally lit up in silhouette, her aura filling the whole car with white light. It was only when I heard the horn honking I realized we weren’t alone.

So we grow older and more tame. A house is more convenient, and there is less danger of being busted for indecent exposure. Yet along with the connection to nature, the sense of danger is removed. Danger kept our adrenaline pumping back then. The supernatural was big and people still believed in it far more than they do today. It wasn’t something you came to believe, you grew up that way. So to be in a graveyard at night set your pulse racing. To go there after watching The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane meant frequent stops to listen, a limb snapping in the woods, the creaking of a tree, till you remember what you’re doing and forget the sounds. You want to hear her breath do that quivery thing again too much to worry about death.

At home behind the safety of closed doors you have to use you imagination, your creativity. Most people don’t, They settle into dull sex and remember their teenage years as their wild years. So often, those relationships fall apart.

That wild side of us, that pagan side of us is hard to recreate with air conditioning. You can incorporate ritual, screw around with the Tantrics but if you want to know about that stuff, go buy a fucking book. I’ve always found trying to remember things I read in a book to be distracting when in the act. The answer to every question that you have lies in the person in front of you, or inside yourself. Everyone is different and sexually especially, most people are far more complex and interesting than anything you’ll ever read. I mean my first sexual thoughts involved family members of the Beverly Hillbillies, and nobody I believe has ever got me to tell that story. No matter how much you think you know a person sexually, together you can always learn more. If you bother to look.

Detail of urn, Old Westbury Gardens, Long Island, New York

Put your face to my window
Breathe a night full of treasure
The wind is delicious
Sweet and wild with the promise of pleasure
The stars are alive
And nights like these
Were born to be
Sanctified by you and me
Lovers thieves fools and pretenders

And all we gotta do is surrender
Come with me on a journey under the skin
And we will look together
For the Pan within

The Pan Within, Mike Scott

It’s a few decades later, another starry May night and I find myself again in one of those graveyards, the one I know best. A place steeped in memory for me. In those decades I’ve learned about Pan, I’ve learned about paganism, I’ve learned about nature and most important, I’ve learned about myself. I’m with a person I’ve known intimately for years, who knows me inside and out. When I look in her eyes I don’t worry about the future, for I know she’ll be there, just as she knows I will. Even if it turns out to be wrong, we believe it.

With that level of trust, you can be free. Free of all your hangups and fears, free of all the defense mechanisms you’ve erected through the years. There on the bare ground with the scent of the soil filling your head, you can go further, losing the limitations and decorum society imposes on you. You can in fact, erase three thousand years of ancestral memories that take us further and further from who we are at our core.

The secret is simple. The essential ingredient that bonds all those elements together is love. We aren’t goats and neither is Pan, for he has the heart and the mind of a human. He might have been a bit more licentious than me in his day, but I have no doubt in his adventures chasing nymphs through the woods, he was as in love in those moments as I was.

Pan is one of the only gods to have died. But he lives on, inside us all. Not everyone needs to find the Pan within. But for those who hear the sounds of those ancient pipes and feels the call, he can still be found. You don’t have to go to Arcadia, pretty much any forest will do. Because it’s not in your surroundings that you find that ancient god, but within yourself, and in the eyes of the one you love.

True witch legends from southern Illinois … giving Carmi’s Cato the witch the last laugh on her neighbors, and an insight into folklore and history

January 6, 2018 By Todd Atteberry 1 Comment

Top: Wooden structure in the woods where the legend points to that Cato might have lived. Dating from much later than Cato’s time, this building was likely used for livestock, but it does sit on a mound which could have once been the site of a house.

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There’s a difference between folklore out here in the prairies of the United States, than say, the folklore of Britain.

When people starting collecting the unwritten tales of small rural communities across Britain and Europe in the 19th century, our ancestors were just getting here, bringing their folklore with them.

There was no folklore to collect, and that which was being made was simply current events.

One of the common traits of folklore is that elements of the stories are often interchangeable, including the people and places involved. The big bad wolf that prowled the watering hole back in Britain didn’t come over with the family. But the stories parents would tell their children so they’d stay away from these danger spots did.

And so Black Annis in Scotland becomes Black Annie in Hawthorn Township, White county, Illinois.

While these stories were being compiled over in Europe, here in the backwaters nobody thought to write anything down. But with the rise of newspapers, some old timer’s memories got recorded.

Mound on which a house once stood, on the property owned by the family of Cato, the witch

I was sent one of these recollections about my hometown some years ago by Richard King, a friend, reference librarian and accordionist. He has a site on folklore from Knox county, Indiana (you can read his article on Cato here, which I steal liberally from). It involved Cato the witch, who lived above the Little Wabash river just south of town, Carmi, Illinois, sometime in the 19th century.

The tale as he records it, is taken from 1889 newspapers. It was the recollection of someone who appeared to have actually known Cato. From the article:

“The old man told the Carmi newsman that two miles south of Carmi near the Indian shoals, weird sounds used to be heard coming from the rocks that rise from the opposite river bank. There at the time, the man said, could be seen the remains of an old house. When he was a boy it was “occupied by a browned and wrinkled crone of perhaps 83 years. Her maiden name was Cato. She was known as ‘Cato the Witch.'”

The old story teller said from the earliest time he knew Cato, she was a firm believer in ghosts. He said she frequently claimed that she could see the forms of dead Indians, who came back to visit the mounds.

The ghosts also called on Cato’s kinfolks and hovered around her cabin in the twilight. According to the old story teller, the ghost brought messages from spiritland approving of the influence for good that she exercised over her credulous neighbors.”

Since he sent that I’ve held onto it, and occasional frequent that stretch of the river where the story points to as Cato’s home. The Little Wabash isn’t a big river by any stretch of the imagination. But when it floods, which is fairly often, much of that area is underwater. Only the high ground would be safe for a cabin. Go a bit east and that area floods as well. Ditto to the west.

So choices for the location of her home was limited.

Indian Shoals proved problematic, as nobody could identify where it was, and it doesn’t show on any maps. I did find reference to it on a river survey, and from that deduced it was a bit to the east of the bridge I’d stop on and ponder the story.

The Little Wabash river, viewed from Possum Bridge. According to the story, Cato’s home would have been on the bank to the right, likely up near the top of the hills, close to the bend in the river.

But this was strange, for I had a friend who grew up in that area, and she said her father used to swear on misty mornings when he walked down close to the river, he could see the shapes of Indians in the mist. Which oddly echoed what Cato said.

As far as I know, the only mounds in this area are about ten miles away, and from the much earlier Hopewell Indians. There were native Americans here at the time that settlers arrived. But they were Shawnees, Piankeshaws and Potawatomis. There was some trouble with them early on, a few raids, a handful of scalpings, retribution and eventually forts were built for the settlers protection.

When the native Americans realized the settlers weren’t going to leave, they moved on. The white settlers of White county weren’t particularly tolerant of native Americans, so it’s unusual that Cato would claim them as an ally, even in spirit form. But if you take her at her word, and the spirits did come to visit the mounds, those wouldn’t be the Indians she was familiar with anyway, but from about 2,000 earlier.

Of course I wasn’t willing to take her at her word, because I didn’t really believe she existed. I’ve heard too many variations on this tale. Besides, it seemed set up for the supernatural punchline. Richard’s article continues “She had raised a large family of boys who took to the wild ways of the woods that surrounded them. Recognizing no law beyond their will, they became a set of idle, wandering vagabonds, and the old crone was left to die alone, so far as her immediate family was concerned.

“When the time of her dissolution was drawing near, and being informed by the neighbors that her magic powers had deserted her, and that death, the inevitable and inexorable, was approaching, she intimated a desire to make a will. Her wishes were complied with, and though the document was informal and could not be admitted to probate, the latter clause impressed itself upon those present, and her wish was literally complied with.

“It was as follows: ‘And, lastly, I desire that the lid of my coffin shall not be screwed down, and that my grave shall be only three feet deep from the surface, as I intend to appear before all my children and warn them of their evil ways.'”

“She was buried in a lonely spot which she has designated, near an unfrequented road, not far from the place where she had lived and died. It soon became deserted on account of the rumors of strange sounds and unearthly apparitions that greeted the ears and eyes of the belated travelers who happened to pass the place.”

“Her children, frightened by their mother’s prediction, fled, and but a few of her descendants are to be found in this country.”

The end of the tale was equally predictable, “… with the exception of the old gentleman who related the above and two or three others, there are none who can point out the lonely grave of ‘Old Cato, the Witch,’ but there can still be plucked from the grassy mound where her cabin stood a few bunches of catnip, wormwood, horehound and tansy and other herbs which she used in the performance of her miracles.”

I’ve told this story countless times around town, and nobody has heard of Cato, or even a witch in this area. Numerous Google searches came up with nothing but Richard’s article and one person who quoted from it. I asked the historical folks of the community and got the same blank stare Google gave me.

But I had a challenge to write a piece on folklore from where I live, and I decided it was time to tackle Cato. I expected it to be easy enough, since there was no truth to it. All I needed to do was quote Richard’s article, think up something intelligent to say about folklore that put it all perspective, and go take some pictures of the area I believed her house would have been.

I’m a hermit at the best of times, even more of late, having good reasons to want to hide from the world. But it was time to get out.

So it’s yesterday morning and I’m sitting here fortifying myself for the adventure ahead, and doing one last search. The hail Mary pass of something so broad you’ll get a trillion responses from Google. Which I did, simply the name Cato and Carmi. But somewhere in there, two words popped out … marriage record.

HOLDERBY, Robert. CATO, Nellie. 17 Mar 1818.

That’s when I remembered, the story said Cato was her maiden name, not given name. In an instant, Cato came to life. This was the only reference to any Cato I found in White county Illinois for over a hundred years.

Tansy, along with the other plants mentioned in the legend aren’t native to North America. Since these were the first European settlers in the area, it’s reasonable to assume a member of Cato’s family or immediate circle brought the plants with them, and passed the knowledge about how to use them down to her.

And she married into a family which during the 19th century and beyond, owned the strip of land I was on my way to photograph. That was an odd coincidence. The Holderby family was one of the earliest in White county, and her husband was the last son of Jon Holderby, the German immigrant who first came here. Some of the family went on to make a name for themselves, but Robert and Nellie disappear after the 1840 census.

Nellie Holderby, the great niece of Nellie Cato. As her namesake, it puts Cato’s story in a different light, as it’s obvious she was loved, and not forgotten as many would think of a crone in the woods.

Yet it’s telling that one of Robert’s nephews named his daughter Nellie. It showed that Cato wasn’t necessarily someone who was feared. But also loved.

Which gave me a start later that day when the librarian at the genealogy library told me she had a photo of Nellie Holderby. I knew instantly this couldn’t be Nellie Cato, as the costume was far too modern.

She reminded me of my great grandmother, who lived in that same area at the same time as her niece. And in fact was related to the Holderbys.

I am in some distant way it turns out, related to Cato the witch.

One of the curious things I learned from hanging out with my grandparents, was how tight lipped they were about the family. “We don’t tell stories on each other,” I heard more than once. They were dead set against genealogy because you find skeletons that belong in the closet. My Granny Bert even took whiteout to the family Bible once.

But it suddenly occurred to me why Nellie and Robert disappeared. Not specifically, but my guess is it wasn’t something you talked about. It’s that simple.

My great grandmother is the one who told me the story of Black Annie, as well as other tales. She was a firm believer in things like witches, though not afraid of them. She’d giggle when she told a ghost story, or rather cackle as she was ancient when I knew her. But witches was different, matter of factual.

In the early days of Carmi, there wasn’t much in the way of doctors. You could find them in town, but further afield, you might be better off turning to someone who knew healing. It was quicker and cheaper. Also, it was somewhat less terrifying. My grandmother still hated doctors, “sawbones” she called them. The early days of frontier medicine could be brutal, and it was a long time before that changed.

But the healers of old, common in the rural parts of Europe tended towards herbalism. It may not work as often, nor as well, but you were left with all your limbs if you survived. Cunning women, wise women or just healer, they went by many names, and often, no names at all.

When your imagination is alive and in focus, it’s easy to see any wooden building in the forest as the cottage of the witch.

Cato appeared to tap into an earlier, old world strain of these healers, for by the 19th century claims to use magic, even in conjunction with herbs was actually more tightly enforced than during the era of the witch hunts. Her claim to receive help in her healing from the spirits of native Americans would have been severely punished by law in Britain at the time, whereas witchcraft itself was by then a minor crime.

Keep in mind, many of Cato’s neighbors would have been first generation Europeans. They knew the perceived evil and dangers, as well as lawlessness in what she was saying about her powers.

Also, the four plants mentioned, wormwood, tansy, horehound and catnip were all used by European healers. It wasn’t native American healing, as these plants aren’t native to North America, and only spread by settlement. Cato was the child of one of the first Europeans in this part of the country. So they had to bring these plants with them, and she would have been too young. It’s quite possible it was passed down to her from the previous generation, who knew what they needed for their trip west.

So obviously, if she had all four plants growing on the site of her cabin, she had to have planted them there.

All this points to the idea that Cato wasn’t an amateur, but had some knowledge of herbalism, and access to the plants. All the elements are there of a woman who if not carrying on a tradition, was familiar enough with it to create one of her own.

Witches, cunning women, even those accused of witchcraft were often found on the outskirts of town, in places others preferred not to live. They were often widows as well, and though I don’t know that Cato was a widow, there were a lot of ways for men to die in the 19th century, and no social safety net on the frontier to take care of their wives. It’s one reason many turned to herbalism, to help themselves survive with no man to help. Marriages were truly partnerships in those days, and when you lost a spouse, it wasn’t easy for someone who made their living on a farm to carry on. The land might not even go to the wife, but to the sons, or just as likely, the bank.

And a lady who claimed to talk to the spirits of Indians might not be someone a relative wanted to move into the house with them.

Since her husband’s family were fairly prominent by this time, it’s likely when she died near the end of the nineteenth century, if she had property, there would have been a will. If she didn’t have property, living close to the river made a lot of sense. That was the land nobody wanted.

+ + +

I headed out of town towards the area in question, and it was a beautiful day. Overcast, intermittent rain and chilly, with lovely leaves all around.

One of the early 20th century plat maps I found showed a house near where I believed her cabin to be, on property owned by her husband’s family. It wouldn’t have been visible from the river, and Cato’s house was supposed to have been long gone or in ruins by 1889.

When I got to the spot where the house was on the map, there was a mound and my heart raced a bit, remembering how Cato’s house was on a mound. There was a single tall tree growing atop it, and it was obvious a house had stood there. But it didn’t fit the story, so I decided skirt the mound and see what was between it and the river.

To the east are fields, stretching out parallel to the Little Wabash, which was hidden by trees. That was all flood plain down there, and yet I saw what clearly could have been mounds. Native American mounds here aren’t the tall pyramid shaped ones, but much lower. It’s nearly impossible to tell what is a mound and what is natural. It would have been hard in Cato’s day as well.

In the woods to the east, a gnarled, dead tree stood sentry, and I went towards it. The song Witchwood by the Strawbs came to mind looking at the tree. It’s strange how a single tree like that can change the whole tone of the woods. I stepped into a green and golden world, the fall foliage still holding on.

The mood was upon me and when that happens, the imagination opens up, along with your senses. You smell the place more keenly. You can hear a snap of a twig a hundred yards away, the echo of the hawks cry, or a crow’s warning.

I saw ahead of me another mound, and peeking out from the top of it above the bushes, a steeply pitched, moss covered roof. Hansel and Gretel had been this way I was certain. Now I knew Cato’s house was long gone, so I wasn’t really walking towards the witch’s cottage. But there was a part of me that just wouldn’t accept that. I’d felt this before, when I went up to spooky places as a child.

Most people forget that feeling, or choose to try, and don’t care to replicate it as adults. I’ve never suffered that. This is the feeling that folk tales are supposed to provoke. The realization that “no, what I fear can’t be true”, unless of course it is. Unless all the old tales are true, and Cato is about to step out from the shadows to greet me.

We are after all, kin, and it’s unlikely that many people stop by looking for her now.

But it wasn’t the witch’s cottage, but probably something meant for feeding or housing livestock, maybe a hundred years old or so. A part of the farm for the house which stood over there on the other mound.

A wide and deep ravine separates the area where I believe Cato lived from the Little Wabash River. This would have not only made for a safer place to live, but help avoid flooding.

Yet it’s also possible, that this was the mound where Cato’s house would have originally stood. The early settlers, like the native Americans before them, often took natural features and built them up. It was wooded now, but it’s been 150 years, give or take. It would have overlooked the mounds to the east as well which fit the tale.

I came down and out of the woods and crossed the field towards the river. There I met with the woods again and after about five or ten yards, found myself staring down into a deep gully, maybe forty foot deep, a bit deeper perhaps. Maybe thirty yards across to the other side, deeply wooded. Opposite me was the point I saw from the bridge where I guessed her house would have stood. But that was now very unlikely. During floods that place would have been an island, and there wasn’t much space for a house up there.

I turned go back, pretty much convinced that where the chicken coop was, was the most likely spot for Cato’s house.

I tripped, just for an instant and looked down. What I tripped over was a stone, a dressed stone, cut into a rough block. Not professional masonry, but obviously shaped by man. I saw the point of another stone jutting out from the ground. It turned out to be about two foot long, also cut, and looked quite like a step. I saw a few more laying around. From there to edge of the woods was about eight feet. Could this have been the foundations of Cato’s house?

Foundation stones found in the woods, far from where the house on the maps placed it. Could these be the stones from Cato’s home, on land nobody wanted?

To my right was a small mound, not big enough for a house, but the right size for a small cabin, for an odd old lady to live out her days. And that felt right. The rocks I’d tripped over might easily have slid down a bit due to erosion. Or have been tossed when clearing out the debris of her home.

The house that stood on the first mound might well have been where her and Robert lived, and when he departed for whatever reason, she moved back here, to the back of the property.

I started to go and remembered the other part of the quest. Cato’s grave. There’s a Holderby cemetery just down the road, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t there. I’d looked over a list of graves and neither her nor her husband were on it.

I recalled the story, “She was buried in a lonely spot which she has designated, near an unfrequented road, not far from the place where she had lived and died.

I looked at the road I stood on and remembered the maps. The road ended here in the 19th century. Once the house was gone that stood on this mound, there would have been no reason for anyone to come down that road. I looked behind me and saw the mounds, and figured this is likely the spot. In view of where she lived and died, in view of the mounds, and a lonely road to haunt. What more could a witch want?

I’m no empath, or particularly sensitive, or a medium in any way. But I couldn’t help but feel after finding the stones quite close by, that this was the spot where Cato’s home stood. It’s just theory, a but it feels right.

Immortality of course.

It’s all conjecture. It’s weaving a story based on a handful of facts and an equal amount of folklore.

But for me, that little old came back to life. I’m pretty certain she did live, and the story told by the old man in the article is likely not far off the truth. Just polished up a bit after frequent retellings, and with a dash of balderdash tossed in by Cato herself, to explain to the children how she did what she did.

Because by then, people no longer saw magic in what these old crones did. The knew about medicine, and they knew certain plants could heal, as well as harm. My family’s ancestors, living just up the road from Cato were already incorporating things into their daily lives which would have been witchcraft a century or two earlier. They were planting by the signs, choosing when to pull a tooth by the phases of the moon, and using folk magic for a variety of things. They just didn’t use the word magic anymore.

But to these kids, hearing Cato talk, she was talking to an audience who wanted to believe. Who saw her with the same awe that people used to see the healer, who wanted to be a little scared, to believe the mysteries of the world. Who wouldn’t want their own witch to visit as a child, especially if she made you feel loved and safe? I know I would have entertained the crap out of any kids who stopped by if I’d been in Cato’s shoes. It’s our nature to join that ritual.

View to the east, which could be natural hills and could be easily mistaken for Indian mounds. The only mounds known in the area are from the Hopewell culture, about 2,000 years ago. Though they would have been taller 150 years ago, it would still be impossible for settlers to tell what was a mound and what was a natural feature.

And perhaps that’s why she told him the tale. She knew her relatives wouldn’t tell stories on her. Maybe she wanted someone out there to pass the tale along. That little boy grew up to be an old man, still believing in what he saw, and he told her story, and it fell in my lap, a relative with no hesitation about telling stories on her, over a century later.

Having written all this down and reading it back, I can see the lunacy in my conclusions. I can also see that there are certain truths in it as well, and it’s impossible this far from the reality of the woman to separate the two.

Cato has been dead for almost one hundred and fifty years. Some time afterwards, she was forgotten by the community where she lived her whole life. An amazing life it had to be, whether she was a witch or just a woman. But once the belief in witches disappeared, Cato disappeared as well.

Today we view witchcraft somewhat differently, a more broad pantheon of beliefs. There’s a strong interest in the subject. And now, thanks to the fact that I do have some local readers who will have made it this far, and Google which will help me spin this tale on auto repeat for years to come, Cato is once more alive in the community where she lived, while her more “credulous” neighbors are long forgotten.

For you see, except for the die hards, history is kind of boring. Folklore has always been more fun, and why what people remember about history, is usually what they learned from storytellers and poets. Folklore brought to life. You simply can’t understand history by facts, you have to know what the people you study believed as well.

Hopefully Cato can still see out of the lid of her coffin to know she had the last laugh.

Christmas Card from Orpheus to Eurydice (last known address, Hades)

January 4, 2018 By Todd Atteberry Leave a Comment

Top: Orpheus in Hades, Pierre Amedee Marcel Beronneau

Editor’s note: This is my website, so I get to do what I want. Occasionally I write fiction, though this was going to be a nice scholarly article on Orpheus and Eurydice. Instead I got to wondering what happened to Eurydice afterwards? Too lazy to look it up, I started to ponder, what if they keep going in various incarnations, like Sisyphus and his rock, for eternity. What if this is their curse? What if after all was said and done, Orpheus decided to send a Christmas card? This is that, not the scholarly article. For those opposed to reading, a shorter video synopsis is included at the end.

+ + +

And now, retracing his steps, he evaded all mischance,
and Eurydice, regained, approached the upper air,
he following behind,
when a sudden madness seized the incautious lover,
one to be forgiven, if the spirits knew how to forgive:
he stopped, and forgetful, alas, on the edge of light,
his will conquered, he looked back, now, at his Eurydice.
In that instant, all his effort was wasted, and his pact
with the cruel tyrant was broken, and three times a crash
was heard by the waters of Avernus. ‘Orpheus,’ she cried,
‘what madness has destroyed my wretched self, and you?
See, the cruel Fates recall me, and sleep hides my swimming eyes,

Farewell, now: I am taken, wrapped round by vast night,
stretching out to you, alas, hands no longer yours.’

She spoke, and suddenly fled, far from his eyes,
like smoke vanishing in thin air, and never saw him more,
though he grasped in vain at shadows, and longed
to speak further: nor did Charon, the ferryman of Orcus,
let him cross the barrier of that marsh again.

Virgil, First Century B.C.

+ + +

Orpheus and Eurydice on the Banks of the Styx, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, 1878

My Eurydice,

How many incarnations has our story been told now? How many lives have we touched since the poets set down our tale however many thousands of years ago? When will we finally get it right and put an end to these lives we torture as we relive our tale through them? When will our story get the ending it deserves?

For it’s an amazing tale of love so true, that when faced with the loss of his beloved, a man found his way into Hades and not only survived, but secured the release of his one true love.

That it failed once is of no consequence, for he that would walk through the gates of hell for you won’t be the kind of man who walks away. It’s why you chose me to begin with. That it’s failed generation after generation doesn’t matter either. Because there’s always a next time to get it right.

For love, true love is eternal. You convinced me that this was true love the day you called me your beloved, you convinced me that it was eternal the day you called me husband, and you’ve never managed to convince me either was a mistake. Just that it’s a bit fucked up.

Instead we inspire the tragic. We don’t even give hope or comfort to those who pray to us, who find their lives entwined in our story. All they find from us is endless night and endless sorrow. That’s not why we’re here. We’re here to prove the stories wrong, that there can still be something new in the universe, that occasionally someone can march into hell for a heavenly cause, break the rules and get away with it. Because even the gods have to bow down to love.

That’s the gift mortals were given after all, to create something new, something beyond our boundaries. We’re given the gift to surprise, even ourselves.

It’s essential we do so, for the lives we alter multiply with each generation. In my own child, I see the same strains of loving without fear, without caution and with a firm certainty that the love he feels is destined to be. We can’t keep leading them down paths to disaster, without also showing them the way to salvation.

These lives which we inhabit become a prosopopoeia for our story, another setting for our tale, told ad infinitum, never varying, never altering its course for a different ending. Lysander spoke the truth, “the course of true love never runs smooth.” But in the end, even Shakespeare on occasion had to relent and let his star crossed lovers find their star.

After so many generations of losing you for nothing more than being human, I have every right to rail against the universe, and those flashes of wrath which you’ve seen from me I could feel were deserved. But in the end, I hate myself because of them. Because I set a higher standard for myself, than you do for me.

The poets never got the story right … beginning with Virgil.

For the underworld wasn’t your prison, your tomb. It was your sanctuary, a place where you could be excused from the tribulations of being human. Where you could be safe, shielded from your disappointment. If you don’t commit yourself to taking a chance, you can’t be let down if it fails.

By the time Virgil set down our story, it had already been lived countless times. You had gone through many names as man tried to untangle our tale … Hecate, Persephone … the poets were busy simplifying that which was complicated, trying to connect the pantheon of gods and goddesses that passed through us, as we pass through mortals now, to try and tie up the strands to include every name, even those which were nothing but duplicates.

In the process, the story was altered. The meaning was lost. We became a cautionary tale about the dangers of love. Virgil saw me as weak because I came to Hades with intent to leave with you, rather than die for you and live underground.

Fuck Virgil, he never lived underground.

It’s simple, I have mortal blood running through my veins, as well as that of the gods. I value this life, I value the time I spend here and I have an unshakable belief that there is no greater sin to the gods or to ourselves, than to waste time. Our original intent has been lost, for our intent was to love, with passion, without boundaries set by any mortal. But instead born out of our love for each other.

Yet this brutal repeating failure complicates the story, because life isn’t simple, and confusion is compounded by love.

Orpheus and Eurydice, Eduard Kasparides, 1896

It wasn’t Pluto who tested me as I led you out of the underworld. I was there, I saw what happened, I was the one begging for your release. When he heard my song, he was happy to see you go, happy to see you rejoin the life you were destined to live. That’s the power of our story.

No, it was your test of my faith that even in darkness and silence, you were following me, that I could know it and believe it. To fail would be unworthy of you, a sign I could never do what you needed to be happy.

It wasn’t what I did while we were together that forced you into the underworld. You were already there. It was my failure to meet your standards after I’d already lost you that keep us apart. A person shouldn’t be judged on how they respond to having the foundation of their life torn out from under them. For in our case, I set that foundation so deep that when it came crashing down, it took everything I had with me,

I more than anyone else know your criteria, and I have to say, you need to lower your standards a bit. Because they’re set too high, and the wrong standards to begin with. They don’t ensure that I or any other man can make you happy, but serve to make certain that no man can ever fully try before you lose faith.

Because when were you ever happier for any length of time? In whose arms have you ever felt complete? Who has called to you from inside your heart as I have? If there is a fate, a destiny waiting for us all, we are immortal proof of that. For our story doesn’t end in this incarnation, beautiful though it was. It merely bides time as we run out the clock on this lifetime and embark on another.

There are the incarnations where we never find each other. I despise those the most, the endless searching, that endless nagging that something is missing in me. There are lifetimes where I know you’re out there, where there are times I feel you close, where I could be looking at your face, brushing up against you in the crowd, but as you don’t recognize me, I can’t find you. There are lives when I feel you searching as desperately as I am, entire ages we’ve spent out of sync, alive at different phases of our lives.

So being born on different continents didn’t make this one seem particularly hard to me. Nor to you in the beginning. You trusted me, that whatever obstacles stood in our way we could overcome. I couldn’t help but believe they could, for I know what lies inside me, that which you’ve never allowed me to prove. Because I fail a test that grows more impossible each time you force me to take it.

It was I that persuaded Charon to ferry me across the Styx, who lulled Cerberus to sleep, who expressed so clearly the pain of your loss, that the lords of the underworld gave their blessing to your escape. Did you really think it would be so hard for me to get a job and insurance in your country, after that? Hell, I’ve stood before Pluto, argued my case and won. I think I could handle the immigration man.

There are no rulers in the underworld now. It got too crowded, too filled with people and the old gods ain’t what they used to be. As man’s belief in them waned, so waned their power. It’s rare to see a god touch a mortal and have them feel it now, unless the mortal believes. For humans, belief has become a tradable commodity. We can shirk our believes as quickly as we can shirk our knickers to satisfy our lust. We trade in our beliefs to justify actions which we know in our hearts are wrong.

Orpheus and Eurydice, George Frederic Watts

As a human there often comes a time when we face someone so utterly reprehensible that we long to end their lives. It’s guilt that prevents it. That and not wanting blood and brains splattered on our shoes. It’s not that we see there could be goodness in their soul, it’s that we don’t want to carry the guilt if we decide later it was a mistake.

Guilt is still the one tool left for the gods to wield, and they strike me hard with it. Yet I’ve never seen anyone so taken apart by it as yourself, when you force yourself to shut off the good you find in others to block the pain of being yourself, fallible.

How I’ve longed to suck the guilt from your soul, because no act that you’ve committed has ever been as despicable as the way you sometimes see yourself. It’s more than you can bear to hurt another soul, but you live on this planet, and sometimes we hurt the ones we love.

It’s how it’s supposed to work, because the ones that love you are able to see the truth, to find forgiveness and keep their love for you alive.

The gods still use guilt to keep us locked up, and we can’t always see their hand at work. But we can feel it … a pang of guilt over something done in the past, which seemed right at the time but ended up causing so much pain … the gods will use that, implant it in your thoughts as your feet seek to leave the earth and fly.

It’s accompanied by a whiff of incense, the bleating of a goat, a feather floating in the air or a leaf falling from a tree, to give it a hint of the divine, of the supernatural, which is about all people seem to believe in now that’s not scientifically proven.

We can believe in ghosts which we can’t see or hear, but refuse to believe in the god who sits across from us on the train, flipping through the Evening Standard and watching us over the top of the page.

That’s why it’s so hard for you and I.

We’re not blessed with clear memories of lives that came before. At birth we have nothing more than a wordless feeling, that we’ve been here before, that there’s something we must do, someone we must find.

We never really know our divinity until we find it in each other. We feel it, we might even believe it, but we can’t use it till we meet and see it reflected in each other’s eyes. Your eyes have gone black for others, but I was the one who could see the colors in the blackness.

Orpheus serenades the Nymphs of the Forest, Charles Jalabert

What could he do? Where could he turn, twice robbed of his wife?
With what tears could he move the spirits, with what voice
move their powers? Cold now, she floated in the Stygian boat.

They say he wept for seven whole months,
beneath an airy cliff, by the waters of desolate Strymon,
and told his tale, in the icy caves, softening the tigers’ mood,
and gathering the oak-trees to his song:
as the nightingale grieving in the poplar’s shadows
laments the loss of her chicks, that a rough ploughman saw
snatching them, featherless, from the nest:
but she weeps all night, and repeats her sad song perched
among the branches, filling the place around with mournful cries.

No love, no wedding-song could move Orpheus’s heart.
He wandered the Northern ice, and snowy Tanais,
and the fields that are never free of Rhipaean frost,
mourning his lost Eurydice, and Dis’s vain gift

Virgil, First Century B.C.

+ + +

The old gods live on, and they still use us for our entertainment. When this incarnation fell apart, I sought to gain distance, to at least live this one out happily and perhaps contentedly. I tried what you try, to run and to forget. But I got to the borders of that landscape and was thrown back. To deny my love for you, once attained is to deny all that I know is true, all I believe is true.

It’s to deny the belief in gods, the belief in love, the belief in magic and enchantment, to deny the belief that there is any kind of order to the universe, no matter how arcane and hard to distinguish. It’s to deny faith exists within me. It’s the most egregious sin of all, to deny the beauty and all that I found wondrous in you.

It is in short, to deny not only who I am, in this incarnation and all previous, but it’s to deny that souls exist in mortals. It’s to relinquish all that makes me human

All in order to avoid the pain, which is in fact, the only common denomination in all of humanity. There are people who never know the love of a mother or father, who never have a full belly, whose lives are mercifully cut short to spare the pain, and those who never know any form of happiness at all. There are those who never know love in any form, let alone the type of all consuming love we’ve known.

The one thing we all have in common, is that at some time on this earth, we feel pain. I accept it, I embrace it and I’ll suffer untold torments of the damned for you.

I trusted we would succeed this time because as you said, I know you better than anyone. I know what lies inside your heart. I know the strength you find in love, the creativity and the magic. You’re not fully mortal. You were a nymph, you have divine blood running through your veins, just as I have it running through mine. It’s why this is our destiny, our curse. We can’t escape it because it’s who we are, no matter what era we find ourselves, no matter whose body. We’ve seen right through each other – as we really are, not as we’ve chosen to believe, so you might fear me, as I might you.

I’ve watched as we’ve conquered our demons one by one, getting ever closer to that day when we write a new ending to this story. This was the closest yet, for there was nothing to keep us apart, except that final test. That I would have doubts you would follow me out of the darkness into the light were well founded.

For there is nothing wrong with doubts, even your doubts in me, providing your faith outweighs them. To have faith without wanting assurance is in reality, taking each other for granted. You never wanted for assurance from me that my love was there, that my belief in you was still strong. You never could have doubted that if you said “come,” I would be there.

For fuck’s sake, I’m the one who followed you into Hades to pull you back out again. Do I seem like the kind of guy who would abandon you over a trifle?

Faith deserves to be tested, for love without faith is nothing at all. But faith is a two way street. You can’t demand faith from me without having faith in me as well. Without having it in yourself. It wasn’t a lack of faith on my part which pushed me away. It was the lack of faith that you still saw us as who you saw us as the last time we lay in each other’s arms. When you were close enough to recognize who I am, and who you are.

In this lifetime, at last, there were no ties holding either of us down, preventing us from taking that next step, from where you found yourself stuck after that first leap, so many years ago. I was the one who had to take the risk for I was still fully mortal, who had to gamble everything, who stood to lose the most from failing, but I had no fear of that. Only the fear we would never get the chance to try. I had that faith, because for once, you were weren’t living the story as it was written. You were proving it wrong.

Until the moment I stumbled which come on, that was wholly predictable after all this time, and you went back to the script.

Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus, John William Waterhouse, 1900

The Ciconian women, spurned by his devotion,
tore the youth apart, in their divine rites and midnight
Bacchic revels, and scattered him over the fields.
Even then, when Oeagrian Hebros rolled the head onwards,
torn from its marble neck, carrying it mid-stream,
the voice alone, the ice-cold tongue, with ebbing breath,
cried out: ‘Eurydice, ah poor Eurydice!’

‘Eurydice’ the riverbanks echoed, all along the stream.

Virgil, First Century B.C.

+ + +

I always do the same thing, come back to the river Styx, sit here on the bank and play my lyre, singing the song others have written for you in my name. For my song has no words, it has no rhyme, it’s nothing but tears.

Besides, my voice has grown weary, my song far less sweet than that which tamed wild beasts and melted the heart of a goddess or two. I sing on but I’ve grown weary of it, weary of the sound of my own voice, the sadness in it, the sense that time is standing still.

For me it is. It’s sitting here, waiting for this lifetime to run out so I can start anew. For I wasn’t one of the other men in your life, who could bear to walk away. Because I know you, and I knew your heart, and I knew even when you pushed me away, it’s not what your heart wanted. It was your mortal head.

I could stand losing your heart, losing your hand of love if I could keep your hand of friendship. And perhaps someday, if I prove myself, I’ll find that it happens.

But I’m weary of proving myself in ways that really don’t reflect who I am. I don’t mind being tested, but it’s always the wrong test. I’ll always have the mortal in me, always be at least part human, and never again be a god. I don’t need to be tested to prove that, I fully admit it. The real test is what kind of man am I? That’s a test I’ve yet to face from you.

And that’s the test you face, that you’ve set up for yourself. Can you ever overcome your fears and doubts in yourself, to trust what you once believed was true, and never could quite shake?

For I fear the reality is you’re not afraid I’ll fail you, but that you’ll fail yourself.

I have faith in you, but it’s a test you have to face. For you know to fail would mean you’d be unhappy in whatever life you chose. If you fail yourself, I’d never be able to make you happy, and you’re safer in the underworld.

That’s the value of living in the moment, as long as the moment doesn’t strain your soul, you can always be happy. As long as you don’t look forward, or back.

So here I sit, awaiting the celebration of that Christ child again. Like most people I only really got what Christmas was all about when I was little. We grow out of the magical stage and into a role as perpetrator, enabling the belief in the enchanted for a child. We stop wishing for that miracle for ourselves, because we stop believing in the existence of miracles. You broke my heart at Christmas, and last Christmas you restored it. This Christmas we were to finally break into the light, leave the underworld behind and admit to our marriage in the world of men.

That would have made me whole. Instead I faced nothing but uncertainty whether you’d ever walk freely from the dark, and increased certainty that whatever the test would be this time, I’d fail it. And so yes, I broke the script and set off to the gates of Hades alone. I had dreams that you’d break the cycle as well, and I’d hear your footfall running to join me – not following behind, but this time at my side.

For that’s the only way we’ll ever pass through those gates together.

Instead the sound I heard was what I expected, just the way the story is written – the gates of hell slamming closed, taking the sound of your voice once more from me.

In short, I’m not doing much for Christmas this year.

Where are the Bacchantes to tear me limb from limb and to still the pain of this life, to pull my head from my shoulders and toss it into the cool depths of the river? My head needs those cool depths. Jesus, I wake up with a pounding head and shaking hands, morning after morning, and yet even the hangover can’t still the grief at your loss.

I give more than a passing offering to Bacchus myself, trying to obliterate thought and reason, the pain and sorrow of what life has become, wandering in endless night for my lost Eurydice. Alcohol, drugs are just other forms of homeopathic medicine. They inflame passion and they kill passion. As above, so below.

And yet the Bacchantes refuse to come do my bidding, to still the pain, perhaps because they know even my severed head would still sing your name, as it did so long ago. Long life becomes the curse itself, more time to remember that which you’ll never forget.

Thracian Girl Carrying the Head of Orpheus, Gustave-Moreau

It is said that those whom the gods would curse, they would first make mad.

It was madness that pulled us together, madness which kept calling us back, for love is madness. It’s not reasonable, it’s not sensible. It’s passion incarnate. That’s the curse the gods put on us long, long ago. It’s the curse we relive time after time, in age after age.

You can’t change your nature, and my nature was that I was born to love this way. In love I devoted my life to you, and no pain that I knew would come after could have prevented me from walking into Hades last year to try once more to bring you to the light.

I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but next time I refuse to follow the script. Next time I carry you out so we can go through the gates with our eyes glued to each other, where we find strength together, Where we can see each other for who we are and what we are.

It could be in the next life that we meet again, it could in a whole new era, but regardless, I know it will happen.

That’s the thought that carries me through as I sit on the banks of the river, still playing that same old tired song, written long ago in ancient Greece.

In the end we are destiny’s fool, and it’s my destiny to be cursed by love. I would rather be a fool for love, and a fool for you than live my life in a way that closed my heart to what it knew to be its salvation. It’s just we don’t all get the happy endings we pray to the gods for.

But someday we will. When we cross the river together.

As always …
Yours,
O

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Editor’s note redux: This is a lot to read, so we compiled a video version of it, complete with a touching Christmas song, as a way to spread our unique brand of holiday cheer. More moving Christmas sonnets in this vein can be found here. Thanks to archive.org for the video of Christmas lights in Chattanooga, TN, and for the incomparable piano skills of keyboardist. Md.E.

Namaste this … a warning before embracing the gods within, for divinity has a dark side

December 22, 2017 By Todd Atteberry Leave a Comment

Top: Gilded head of a Minerva, found in Bath, Somerset. Originally atop a statue larger than life, she would have looked out from her temple next to a sacred spring onto the altar where sacrifices were made in her name. That the gods require living sacrifice should be a warning to us all, that not all divinity is indeed sweet.

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I cringe when I hear people say namaste. I can’t help it, it’s a reflex with me. Partly it’s the trendiness of it. I hear it from a lot of Buddhists. Many of these people are attracted to Buddhism and the belief that it’s not a religion. So they can be spiritual but not religious. It’s the growing modern concept of dealing with the soul by eliminating the superstition.

Trouble is, namaste is a Hindu term, and there are 33 millions gods of Hinduism. It’s a religion, and namaste is a recognition of that.

It’a usually translated as “I bow to the divine in you,” which is ideally worded to avoid any connotation to gods. But the divine relates to the divinity, which is indeed of the gods. And the saying is true, for the gods are reflections of us all.

It’s quite often argued that the gods are nothing more than an attempt to explain human behavior. Venus is the goddess who embodies love for us, Hera takes us down a matrimonial path, we get drunk with Dionysus and go to war with Ares.

But Ares didn’t lead the United States into Iraq, not did Athena. People did that. We no longer ascribe to the gods what humans do for their own self interest. And yet those tendencies are of the gods, and as such, part of the divinity inside us, that we forget when we mindlessly namaste the shit out of each other.

My favorite warning about gods comes from Jethro Tull … “he who makes kittens, puts snakes in the grass.”

Many of the ancient gods were quite amoral, they did what they did and the concept of right or wrong didn’t come into play. They simply did what they wanted for their own ends, their own entertainment. Being gods, that makes those actions just as divine as actions which make the world a better place.

Minerva was a goddess of war. She was the daughter of a titaness, Metis, whom Jupiter had swallowed whole after lying with her, when he remembered the prophecy that he would be overthrown by his own child. Metis didn’t take this too well, and while in Jupiter’s belly, forged a suit of armor and weapons for the daughter that grew within her womb. The constant pounding of the forge led to a headache, so he consulted Vulcan, who split his head with his hammer, and out burst Minerva, fully grown, in armor and bearing a sword.

Minerva’s cult grew from that of the Greek Athena, and it was by the Romans that Minerva was brought to Britain, where this head of hers was found in Bath, Somerset.

Minerva was responsible for many wondrous things, but she still kept her hand in the art and machinery of war. She was gracious to those she defeated, but even in that she could have the wrath of a god. When Arachne boasted that her weaving skills were better than Minerva, the goddess challenged her to a competition. Unfortunately for Arachne, the judge was Minerva, who declared herself the winner, and as a punishment for daring to speak the truth, turned her into a spider.

Jehovah is no better. He destroyed Job’s family and almost drove him out of his mind, just to win a wager with Satan. The lives destroyed in the process didn’t matter. All that mattered was proving he was right. That’s of course just one of a multitude of times Jehovah showed that especially when there is only one god to rule mankind, god becomes a bit of a dick.

But this behavior is universal to the gods. Bad behavior as well as good, is divine.

So is it any surprise that these tendencies towards the horrific exist in us as well? The tendencies towards destruction that are found in the gods and inside ourselves are just as spiritual as those which lead us to happiness.

Once I fell under the spell of Venus and fell in love. At times it felt as though we were but pawns on the chessboard that the gods were using for their entertainment. It was a love affair years in the making and when we came together, worlds collided and we were launched into the ether. We married the night we met, not legally obviously, but in the circle at Avebury, where these things are consecrated by the gods. It was legal to us, for we both believed totally in it.

Then suddenly it was gone. But a different god moved another piece on the chessboard, and once more we found ourselves together, engaged again and this time we were going to do it legally. It was a relationship built on faith, my faith in her. I saw our love as sacred, for I saw the divine in her. It wasn’t an illusion, that part was real.

Faith is a necessary component of the sacred, and it’s blinding. It allows you to only see the side of the gods they wish you to see. I’ll be honest … she dumped me five times in two years, nullified a marriage and had broke one engagement already. As she said many times, she’s not good at commitments. I knew all this, but I chose to believe.

I chose wrong. She dumped me again, this time permanently and quite ruthlessly. The gods freely change their minds, and take away their promises.

To add insult to injury, when she saw I was at my lowest point, she plunged the dagger even deeper. I was lucky, one of the gods was looking out for me, and I’m still alive.

Cold hearted? Calculated? Who can say? You don’t question the gods. They don’t allow it. Your voice only reaches Olympus if they choose to allow it. My number is blocked on her phone.

I have a new found respect for Job now. I just don’t share his faith in divinity, having seen that which you can only see once the blinders of faith fall away. My goddess was entirely too human.

We curse the gods in the end, but our fate is in our hearts, we still love them. Because they live inside us.

The divine truly is inside of us all. How you bring it out is up to you. But gentle reader, be forewarned. Behind that sweet, peaceful smile you see in the one you love, there is in fact a god or goddess. Just remember, sometimes they have fangs, hidden behind that smile.

On paganism and the naming of gods … “Will the real god please stand up?”

December 1, 2017 By Todd Atteberry Leave a Comment

Top: Jan Van Eyck, The Arnolfini Wedding

Today I found myself listless, without direction. My sails were up, but there was no wind. The albatross was still around my neck. It has begun to stink.

Then someone mentioned starting a religion and I thought, “I’m game for that.”

My goals in life have been achieved, there’s nothing left but starting a riot or starting a religion. Riots are dangerous and very loud. I’m in a different place, so I opted for religion. I have no details about it yet, except I believe we need stone circles. The person who suggested it lives in California, so its likely orchids will be involved too.

Anyway, here’s my sermon. Today’s sermon is on …

Paganism and the naming of gods … “Will the real god please stand up?”

I’ve always thought it dubious that a religion which prides itself on a single god not only feels the need to name it, but holds the name so sacred that they refuse to say it, choosing instead to use the most generic term imaginable … god.

I once got in trouble in Sunday school class as a kid for asking why it’s a sin to say goddamn, because it’s taking god’s name in vain, when god isn’t his name?

I wasn’t long at that church, and from that point on if I was in church it usually had something to do with sex.

The problem I have with nearly all religions – orthodox or heathen, is this incessant need to label. Here’s why …

Labels are a human invention. Ask yourself – what’s your dog’s name for you? If dogs label, one of those sounds he makes is his name for you. If dogs give names, shouldn’t you have figured out what it is by now?

Animals don’t need names or labels to recognize us. They do it through their senses, a way which can never be misled by changing names. Nor do we need to give them a name. They know from our voices, how we look at them exactly how we feel, and if we want their attention. The need to label and name things is a wholly human one.

I’ll tell you what else doesn’t use labels. Trees. Grass. It’s just us that does that. And relying so much on labels creates division and false expectations which too often are never met. Because labels are human and humans are fallible.

We label gods, thus rendering them human. This screws up the works, so that eventually you have a god which creates the world for the sole purpose of testing those he was created, his children. To pass this test, you have to worship him, bow down to him and follow all his laws. Even then, there’s no guarantee you and your family won’t get wiped out along with the sinners. That ceiling beam that comes crashing down on your child’s head is part of god’s plan.

No, that’s not divine. That’s trying to make labels and expectations work, when they just don’t. It’s unnatural and it becomes illogical, a farce.

My issue isn’t with the almighty, but instead his scribes. I can’t help but think for all the beauty and poetry of countless religious texts, of all faiths, the minute we start trying to explain things, we go off track.

Religion has brought us many things of beauty when it imbues a society with faith. But invariably religions end up dividing us. It’s not the nature of the divine which does this, but our tendency to humanize the sacred.

For instance, I love Pan, and I can see the truth in the stories about him. And I can see gods as metaphors for human behavior.

But the minute you label something, name it, when you define it, you not only say what it is, but also what it isn’t. The reality is we grow, and sometimes what we weren’t, we become. Gods, predefined in the dim and distant past, don’t have that same ability to expand. Because they’re fixed by dogma.

So instead, pagans tend to have a looser definition of their gods. The danger in that is without a definition, words lose meaning. When deities begin to vary to the degree that they do now, simply collecting them all under a single name serves no real purpose, except to make paganism more like the established religions. It makes followers of us, devotees and when that happens I remember … that human need for fawning worship is what led me away from Christianity. A good father doesn’t demand you worship him, he just hopes you love him.

Human fathers who test their children’s love are manipulative bastards. Humans are supposed to be made in the image of god. If God does this, and since god is infallible, it’s not a sin. I can’t buy that. Once again, it’s man’s logic, not divine.

But that’s what happens when you start adding labels and definitions to things that should be held sacred, and should be nameless.

The reason animals don’t need names is they recognize by their senses. They know us by sight, by our scent, our sounds, our touch. Without labels, their senses become heightened. They can see things about us wordlessly, that other humans miss. If we follow their lead, that’s how we find gods.

Labels and names are part of the human system. We need them to communicate on a certain level, so we all agree on what we’re doing. When they’re a part of something holy, they take on special powers, deeper meanings. But they’re only an outline, a way of trying to describe the underlying magic which can’t be put into words.

Primavera, the painting by renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli is as famous for being enigmatic as it is for its technique and beauty. It depicts the progression of spring, and is generally believed to be something of an allegory on fertility. Though it contains sacred figures, like the divine itself, the artist left it to the viewer to interpret, much like nature itself.

An example … weddings are a combination of the personal and the sacred. Everyone from congress, parliament, religions and individuals get into the act of defining the human and the social aspects of what constitutes marriage. That’s what people focus on, and when your relationship strays outside of those definitions, the marriage is considered broken.

But for those who go through the ceremony, there’s an underlying, deeper force at play – the wedding, the ritual. You don’t need a wedding, but if you chose to have one, you engaged in a magic ritual, designed to call up the creator of the universe. And in front of that force, you made a vow.

Pretty brave when you think about it, and most people don’t. I’ve done it three times, twice without really considering what I was doing. It didn’t stick. The third time I was aware. When I made my vows, they weren’t just to her, but to a divine consciousness that I was facing directly. The eyes I looked into were filled with the sacred, in that moment she was my goddess, and when I see her eyes now, I still see that.

I don’t need to worship Diana, or Venus or Aphrodite. I don’t need to to worship the woman in whose eyes I saw the divine, though debatably I do. I just have to remember what I saw and felt.

The social part went to shit, and by any definition of marriage, we’re not it. As many people have pointed out, thank god it wasn’t legal.

That doesn’t matter to me. I saw the divine. I made a vow, and though it consisted of words, I couldn’t tell you what they were, just what they meant. It meant I’m bound to keep them.

The ring stone at Avebury Stone Circles and Henge. Standing stones in Britain and Europe that had a hole through them have a long tradition of being associated with love and fertility, yet the details vary from place to place. Our evolving relationship with sexuality can range from acceptance to abhorrence, and as a result, the ring stone like many others at Avebury was broken up in the eighteenth century. Below is William Stukeley’s drawing of it, showing how it appeared for nearly two thousand years, before society decided it must be destroyed.

You don’t take part in a magic ritual simply to take part. There’s a reward for it. In my case, the reward is that I get to love. Not according to man’s laws, society’s norm, or any other human standard. But as long I keep my vows – and I know what that means will evolve over time – then I get to keep that love inside me.

It sounds crazy, most religions do. But I’ve heard people talk about their wives, and I’d rather have the love I have than that.

That tree may not know your name, but it might know your touch. It might recognize your voice. That look of adoration in your dog’s eyes is genuine. It doesn’t need a name to call you by, to describe your relationship. It simply loves. That’s nature’s way.

To me paganism is dispensing of man’s role in the sacred, and looking to nature as a guide. Words are useful, labels are sometimes necessary. But I don’t need to name my gods. I just need to find them and keep them close.

I love all the gods, the myth and wondrous things which have been created in their name. But that’s a testimony to our humanity. And our humanity goes hand in hand with our inhumanity. I seek the divine.

When you look into your lover’s eyes and see the sacred looking back at you, and you accept that, you can expect be bound to it. For me to turn my back on that is to turn my back on who I really am, to turn my back on the sacred. When the human aspect of it falls apart, and you find you’re still bound to the vow to the sacred, it’s a brutal lesson, but that’s nature way. The good news is you get to evolve.

And come up out of the sea.

Eclipse: Seeing the future during an eclipse in a southern Illinois graveyard where the burials stretch back almost 2,000 years

November 13, 2017 By Todd Atteberry Leave a Comment

Top: The 2017 North American Eclipse viewed from Marshall Ferry Cemetery, Rising Sun, Illinois

A person quite dear to me once said that Breathe, the first song on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon always brought me to mind. “Breathe, breathe in the air. Don’t be afraid to care …”

Music is more than the soundtrack of our lives. It works its way into us. Some songs are as much a part of our fiber as our family and friends. Dark Side of the Moon is one such piece for me, being a part of my life for over forty years. There’s not a sentiment in any song I’d rather be associated with.

It was the eclipse, the Great North American Eclipse, August 21, 2017, spanning the entire breadth of the north American continent, cutting a swath of darkness and marketing across the United States. As luck would have it, the point where totality would be the longest was less than an hour from here.

There is such a thing as eclipse snobbery. The important part to these people is the moment of totality, about being able to take off your glasses and see the corona. For me it was something different. I just didn’t know what yet.

It was the morning of the eclipse and I still hadn’t decided where to go. I could head to the Shawnee Forest which would be in totality, but I was pretty certain that traffic would be a nightmare. I kept putting it off.

Now, with the eclipse itself only an hour so away, I had to make a decision.

I grabbed a blue tooth speaker, because the soundtrack was preordained. There was really only one album that would work for this journey. I took a bottle of mead out of the pantry and threw the cork away. It was warm, sweet and it needed to be gone before I got back.

It’s a trick I learned from the Irish, who when making a dangerous crossing of a bit of ocean, would toss the cork from the bottle of poteen into the water, because you might as well finish the bottle because you didn’t know if you were going to make it to the other shore. I grabbed a peach, an offering of sorts and set off. As I pulled out of the driveway, the kids at the elementary school across the street were already coming out, wearing their eclipse glasses. I took the direct route to the country, intending to cut across. I started the music …

View from the top of Marshall Ferry Cemetery during the eclipse. If you look closely you can make out some of the Hopewell Mounds on top of the hill. The Hopewells used the place as a mortuary, and in addition to the mounds where they believe prominent members of the community are buried, there is also a section set aside for the general population. It’s rare to find all three elements in a single prehistoric graveyard in this part of the country.

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When I’d thought about where to watch this over the preceding weeks, I kept thinking Dogtown Cemetery, or to use its proper name, Marshall Ferry Cemetery in Rising Sun, Illinois. At the cemetery I’d have only 99.4% totality. I decided fuck totality. I wanted a moment that meant something more than a visual effect. I needed to be alone.

New Haven is where the first settlers came into this area, about 1800, led by Daniel Boone’s brother. From New Haven you could see the Dogtown Hills. To many, if not most residents of the area, the hills, the town, the cemetery is Dogtown. Originally, a clever settler started a ferry at the river there, Marshall Ferry. A small town sprung up, a village anywhere else. It was given the name Rising Sun. When the bridge was built some miles away, the town withered, or at least never grew. Today it’s a handful of houses, and a graveyard on the hill overlooking it.

Two thousand years ago, there was a village there as well. There was also a graveyard on the hill, one of great importance. These were the Hopewell people, and they inhabited this land for about 800 years, between 400 BC and 400 AD. It was abandoned for who knows how long, though when they excavated some of the mounds at Rising Sun, they found later native Americans had also buried their dead in these mounds. It’s much the same as what was happening in neolithic Britain about the same times, later cultures burying their dead in the barrows of those who preceded them.

It happens here to this day. Marshall Ferry Cemetery is an active graveyard, still accepting burials, and has since the first European settlers arrived. There are people there I know buried there, relatives, friends as well as their ancestors.

It’s about a fifteen or twenty minute drive to Dogtown from Carmi, and totality was less than a half hour away. I get turned around in the Dogtown hills. I didn’t have time for that now.

I was telling time by Dark Side of the Moon. When I reached the Wilson Mounds, just a couple miles or so from Dogtown Cemetery, I stopped, put on my glasses and looked to the sun. There was a pretty healthy chunk of it already missing, more than half of the moon was obscuring the yellow disk.

And sure enough, even that close, I went the wrong direction. I was on the second half of the album now, the guitar solo in Money, things felt wild, panicky and out of control.

I made a U turn, found the right road and as the hills of Dogtown loomed larger, I noticed something unusual. The power lines along the road were lined with birds, facing the sun, watching. They would scatter as I approached, and looking in the rear view mirror, I saw they went right back to their perch. At least I knew I wouldn’t be watching it alone.

Another trait the Hopewells and later Mississippian culture share with the Neolithic Britains -like the Barrows on top of Waden Hill, Windmill Hill and most notably, West Kennet Long Barrow, the Indians built their mounds often on the high ground. As a result, many natives of the area know there are Indian mounds around Dogtown, but don’t realize when they’re standing right on top of some of them. Or burying their dead in them.

The tallest mound, at least in the cemetery itself is at the highest point, overlooking what would have been the village, the new village having sprung up now below. There a wooden cross has been erected – a shadow of making Christian sites out of the pagan perhaps? There’s also a bench, and it’s where I found myself.

When that fat old sun in the sky is falling
Summer evenin’ birds are calling
Children’s laughter in my ears
The last sunlight disappears

I wasn’t alone. I knew I’d meet ghosts up there, for I was bringing them with me, and that was part of the reason I came. It was another visit to this cemetery, less than a month earlier and a happier Pink Floyd album was playing then. One of hope and at times, domestic bliss. It’s what that moment felt like, complete with the sound of children’s laughter. Sometimes you live life like a tightrope walker. That day we all found bliss being that high, nothing on either side to catch you if you fall, just the complete certainty that you won’t with the sun shining on your face. But today, there were gusts up there on the wire and the sun was eclipsed by the moon. I knew all that was left was the falling.

My truck climbed up the steep road that led to the cemetery. I parked, grabbed my supplies, my speaker still playing away … “the lunatic is on the grass” and started up the hill among the graves.

Dark Side of the Moon is also about madness, and how the pressures of life will drive you to it. Defining madness is hard. Sometimes it’s hard to see if you’re mad, or the rest of the world is mad. Some of us look into the eyes of the ones we love and see insanity there, while they look into our own and see the same thing. Sometimes you need the moon to block the light to see the truth.

There are times it’s hard to see what’s right before your eyes. Sometimes we don’t want to, it’s too horrifying to look. So we go on oblivious to what’s really happening, trusting that things will get better.

Sometimes they get much, much worse.

I drank from my bottle and fell back on the bench, looking up. It was noticeably darker, not like night, not like evening even, but the greens were richer, electric, the sky a different shade of blue.

It got another shade darker in the graveyard.

At the highest point of Marshall Ferry Cemetery stands a mound built by the Hopewell people, over 2,000 years ago. Today a cross stands in the spot which would have looked out over their village below. Perhaps it’s a natural tendency to Christianize the pagan in this country, as it was in Europe.

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It’s easier to see past the moment when the moon is eclipsing the sun. The shine is missing, the glare is gone and you can see further, to the end. Laying there on the bench, I saw the future and it wasn’t a matter of conjecture. More like a mathematical certainty.

And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forbodings too
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon

And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear
You shout and no one seems to hear
And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon

What I saw in the shadow the moon was as clear as day. I tried shouting later, but as the song says, no one seemed to hear. I was just another Henny Penny running around shouting that the sky was falling, when I was supposed to be quiet, pretending all was well. The ghosts I found in the cemetery were already memories, no longer living to me. I knew it from that point on.

I cried. It was the last time I cried, and since that day I’ve gone through some serious shit. Everything I saw there, looking up into the sun hearing the galloping hoofbeats of the apocalypse coming my way, came to pass, just as I saw it. But nothing has brought tears since. Numb.

Then the Pink Floyd crashed into that D chord that signifies the beginning of Eclipse, and if there’s a more majestic moment in music, I’ve yet to hear it. I check the clock, totality had begun.

All that you touch
And all that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
And all that you love
And all that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
And all that you give
And all that you deal
And all that you buy
Beg, borrow, or steal
And all you create
And all you destroy
And all that you do
And all that you say
And all that you eat
And everyone you meet
And all that you slight
And everyone you fight
And all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that’s to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon

The album ended, and I heard the night sounds. The insects, different birds, but mostly, the silence. You don’t realize the volume of the ambient sounds of the daytime, till they’re suddenly missing. I would imagine even the farmers at that moment had stopped their work and was looking skyward.

I lay there and tried to take a photo of the sun through my glasses, but it came out tiny and I gave up and just felt. What would have the native Americans thought at this moment? Were they here now? There was a presence up there. I was almost certain if I looked down the hill, I’d see people from some several different ages, looking to the sky. I didn’t feel alone.

Then the moment passed. It wasn’t from looking at the clock, the sun didn’t suddenly appear, but the change was visceral and almost immediate. The light came back slowly, the crickets and cicadas gave way to the morning birds, chirping as though the sun was coming up and then almost immediately stopping again as it came out fully risen. I sat up and sliced the peach. I ate half, left the other half as an offering, a thanks to those who shared the moment with me. I poured half the bottle of mead onto the mound, where it could drip down to those thirsty souls buried beneath.

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It’s been almost three months since that day. I finally unloaded the images from my camera and there it was, the little speck of light on a field of black. I zoomed in. Eclipse. A bit blurry, but more like the camera captured my imagination at that moment, looking as much like an eye as anything else.

Moments like that make soothsayers of us all, if we choose to look that direction. There are those that say these synchronized moments in life are a sign of being on the right track, enlightenment even. I didn’t time my trip so that Eclipse came on at the moment of totality. I didn’t leave the house after planning exactly what time to set off to reach the cemetery in time. It all just fell into place, because I was going someplace magical. Not Marshall Ferry Cemetery, not to view the eclipse, but someplace inside. A dark place, but one I needed to visit.

It was a day of darkness for me, on a day which for most people is a once in a lifetime experience. But oddly enough, our little town is on track to be under totality for another eclipse, about six years from now. Plenty of time to come out of the darkness, and into the light.

For the love of witches

November 3, 2017 By Todd Atteberry 1 Comment

MY FIRST MEMORY OF THE WORD WITCH happened when I was young, maybe five or six, though it’s likely I’d heard of witches in fairy tales before that.

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Top: The Cove at Avebury, the oldest feature of that stone circle, where they honored their dead

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We were riding through the country at night, southwest Indiana, a very German part of the state, attending a German festival in St. Wendel. My grandfather decided to take the windy, country route. At a crossroads he pointed up to the silhouette of tree. It was huge … gnarled and black against the nighttime sky. From one of its lower branches hung a black cat.

“Witches”, he said. He rambled on for a while about them, came from Germany, the old country. That generation still firmly believed in witches, and I got an earful that night.

He wasn’t technically my grandpa, and he wasn’t my grandpa that was a grave digger. He came to stay with my grandmother and her mother as a lodger, and stayed on fifty years or more. His family was from Missouri, said they were plantation owners back before the Civil War. But his mother and father were in hindsight, probably not that far off the boat. They were German/Welsh in all likelihood, and both know a thing or two about witches. They were country people – barn dances, his mother always wore a dress, even to feed the chickens. When we visited you still crapped in the outhouse. She had a big dog named Dobber who barked incessantly at the chickens. She loved him to death but also beat him with her cane on occasion to shut him up.

As a child, the landscape of southwest Indiana still had an old world feel about. Heavily settled by German immigrants, they also brought along stories and beliefs in witchcraft.

The real gothic curiosity cabinet was once a part of her bedroom set.

That was about fifty years ago. Since then I’ve learned a bit more about witches. And like that black cat that night in the tree, I still don’t know what I’ve seen. I find it hard to believe now that it was a cat I saw all those years ago. Likely a paper bag, or rag thrown over a branch by a worker during the hot August sun. But that night at least, it was a black cat, hung at the crossroads.

As a kid, witches were everywhere, and most particular, on TV. Bewitched … Samantha Stevens had a tremendous impact on this young boy. Darren Steven had a doting wife who met him at the door with a pitcher of martinis. Okay, I can drink martinis, but a pitcher before supper? And she had powers … that boggled a pubescent boy’s imagination, because at the time I barely knew what sex was, Special powers only made it all the more mysterious.

Darren drew pictures for a living, and thought up slogans. That part stuck with me and I went into advertising. It was a wise choice. I worked for strong women who helped counterbalance the beliefs instilled in young boy’s minds in the sixties. You learned women had power, and a deeper power than most of the men around you.

First period New England architecture is a symbiosis of old world and the beginning of a new. In Salem that style takes on a witchy overtone, and for those with a witchy disposition, makes Salem perhaps the most romantic town in North America.

Any ancestral memories I might have felt wandering the streets of Salem, Massachusetts years later were corrupted by Bewitched’s visit to Salem, which I saw as a kid. But there’s something about first period New England architecture that touches that spot inside us, that kindles a belief in witchcraft. It’s the combination of the old world and new, along with the historical connotations that send a natural shiver up your spine.

That shiver feels a lot like love.

I started wandering the woods as a teenager, and unconscious thoughts of witches began bubbling to the surface. I’d find certain stands of trees in a forest and see the coven there, or rather feel them. I could even make out where their feet had trampled the forest floor from their dancing if I focused my imagination on it. Okay, it was the seventies and I’d seen all the Hammer films, the trashy made for TV movies like Satan’s School For Girls, Dark Secret of Harvest Home and had just discovered marijuana. The Lord of the Rings was still just a series of books. We were used to using our imaginations back then.

I knew it was probably deer rather than the bare feet of witches and warlocks, but there was a definite tie in my imagination between the landscape and witchery. To the south of where I lived, the hills are closer together, everything seem more compact, whereas in the other directions it’s the prairie. It’s only to the south, on those country roads that I get that same chill of the witch, it’s where our only known local folktale about witches is set.

Oddly enough it appears she really was a witch, and an ancestor of mine. So maybe this is in my blood?

Cato seems to be the local witch story where I grew up, her cabin having been built on the bluffs above the Little Wabash River. It’s said that when you find tansy growing wild, you know you’re where her cabin stood.

+ + +

In 1979, Jim Morrison came back from the dead for a while, and his biography grew to include the infamous marriage to a self professed witch, in a magical ceremony. That piqued my interest. Not because I believed you’d find some power in a ritual like that which you didn’t have before, but it was the intensity of experience. I never had that with someone, and in your early twenties intensity was a good thing.

A vast radiant beach in a cool jeweled moon
Couples naked race down by it’s quiet side
And we laugh like soft, mad children
Smug in the wooly cotton brains of infancy
The music and voices are all around us

Choose they croon the ancient ones
The time has come again
Choose now, they croon
Beneath the moon
Beside an ancient lake

Enter again the sweet forest
Enter the hot dream
Come with us
Everything is broken up and dances

We need great golden copulations

When the true kings murderers
Are allowed to roam free
A thousand magicians arise in the land
Where are the feast we are promised?

Jim Morrison, Awake

+ + +

Growing up in a small midwestern town, where sex was had in the country because your parents were always home, both the woods cemeteries became our bedrooms. There’s a clear difference between rutting in the forest and in a graveyard, but in both there’s a striking similarity. You get the feeling you’re not alone, you’re being watched and not by anything human. So I think a lot of people of my generation probably idealize the memories of some of our earliest sexual explorations, because of that. We were still of a generation who could believe that there really was something amongst those tombstones in the dark.

Gradually these peculiar interests waned and I lived a more normal life. I had a brief flirtation with a lady who had vampire teeth implants, but that didn’t lead anywhere, and she was far from witchy. My interest in the supernatural disappeared entirely. At best it was the source of a few stories I might tell amongst friends.

So it was about 20 years ago and I’m in a pub on the edge of Ireland. Nothing to the west of us but ocean, staying in a small village – Teelin – not much more than a post office, a few B&Bs and this pub. No food in the village, I’d subsisted for the entire day and much of the night on Guinness, Jameson and crisps. There was a lot of fiddle music, a lot of storytelling and as the night fell and the music kept going, the pub filled up.

I was married at the time, she was at the table and I got up for the loo. Blocking my way was a tiny blonde lady who just looked like trouble. I believe I said “pardon me” and she stepped out of the way, said something I didn’t quite catch and I smiled and went in to do my business.

When I came back out we smiled at each other and I went back to my wife. She followed and asked who this woman was. I said my wife. This seemed to be the wrong answer.

She asked for a cigarette and I gave her one. She broke it and threw it on the floor. She did this three times. She started speaking of how I had led her on, how I was ignoring the fact that I really wanted her, we both knew it and stormed off. A fellow whispered in my ear that whatever I did sure pissed her off, and I might want be careful, because she was a witch who lived down by the water.

Before I had a chance to thank him she was back and the crowd cleared out of her way as she dramatically raised her arms up and her hands over head and brought the wrath of some unknown gods down on me. She was likely speaking Gaelic, I didn’t understand a word of it, but I knew something was about to happen, something life changing. All those memories of bare feet in the woods came rushing back all at once and time stood still.

I half expected to turn into a frog to be honest. I have to say, the experience felt authentic. Especially her piercing screams and curses as she was drug out and the proprietor apologized and tried to make sure I was okay.

The funny thing is, she was right. I didn’t say anything, look at her any particular way, but in my thoughts … yeah. If she had just grabbed my hand and drug me outside to the rocky beach I would have been lost. The marriage was never the same again.

That moment changed me more than I realized. I can’t say that her curse destroyed the marriage. But whatever she woke in me stuck, and from that point on I couldn’t be satisfied being a part of something grey and ashen. I knew I couldn’t be satisfied with a companion. I had to find someone who could touch my soul and whose soul I touched as well. Or I’d rather be alone.

The village of Port on the Donegal Coast, not far from Teelin where I was cursed by a woman believed to be a witch. Could have been my imagination, but her curse appeared to work

Later I did date a lady who took me to my first pagan gathering. It didn’t feel right. There was no smell of peat burning in the stove, there was no darkness, just light. We stood in a circle and announced the name of our gods. All I could think to say was “Elvis.” Nobody batted an eye.

It was a decade later before I found someone who touched me in a way I had long since given up on ever experiencing. We arranged to meet in Avebury and married that first night we were together, there in the circle. It was the Jim Morrison wedding experience – without the blood, and absinthe instead of cocaine. It was cloaks and velvet and the wind whipping around us so fiercely I couldn’t hear myself speak. It was like pulling words out of the gale. Vows and rings were exchanged.

In that moment at least, we were witches. When you make a vow to a witch, you should know it sticks. Even when she’s gone. The vow you make in a ceremony like that, in a place like that doesn’t go unnoticed. You go somewhere like that to call up powerful forces. Doesn’t matter if that’s not your intention even. They’re there and listening. A wedding is a magic ritual, be in Christian, Pagan or even civil. You’re submitting your love to an authority, to substantiate the truth of the vows you make. To break those vows you have to stop believing in magic. Once you’ve seen magic like that, it’s damned hard to forget.

You see, it’s not the tools that one uses for divination that makes one a witch, nor the herbs you gather, spells you concoct. You can be a witch and never know it. My witch didn’t need any of those things, it came natural, from intuition as much as anything else. When her intuition became cloudy, the magic went poof. At least for her.

The real magic comes when you connect with someone in a way that transcends all the normal protocols. A witch is a conduit to a force beyond both of you, that person allows you to find the magic in yourself. And together, you find the magic beyond yourselves. You don’t have to drape yourself in black, you don’t have to mumble spells or ride a broomstick. You have to love, accept the light and the dark, and when you do, you tap into something universal.

Then there’s the witch that haunts your dreams, your thoughts, your memories. Some of us were born with that instinct, that gnawing feeling that no matter how peaceful life with someone feels, there’s something missing. That connection with the unknown, with the ancient, the primeval. No matter where you go, your heart is by that blazing hearth, the firelight flickering in her eyes, bewitching. When you find it, how do you live without it? Because that feeling never really dies, even if you try. You still carry it, because it bruised a part of you too deeply inside to ever have anything else touch you there.

In the end, it was Samantha Stevens who cursed me to spend decades of my life in search of the witch who could capture my heart.

When she’s gone, living without that sense of mystery, danger and heart pounding excitement is to live a grey, ashen existence. The magic was buried beneath the pain of loss. Percy Shelley wrote to Mary Godwin, who later became his wife … “This separation is a calamity…[I feel] a desolation of heart where you have been accustomed to be.”

That’s howI felt when she left. I’m not saying it was bad, but on a night walk about that time, I met a black cat who danced to the side to avoid me crossing its path.

Perhaps it’s almost time to go looking that for that crossroads in the dark of night, maybe after all these years it’s finally rubbed off on me, and I’ve become the witch.

Jacques Brel wrote in the song My Death, “Angel or Devil, I don’t care. For in front of that door there is you.” Maybe we just wander through the darkest part of the forest, looking for the witch you feel in your bones is there, and know beyond a shadow of a doubt, that figure that waits on the path before you, standing in front of the door is your destiny.

It takes faith, because you never get to see her face, until it’s too late to turn around.

Is it Halloween or Samhain? What’s the real difference and when is it?

October 30, 2017 By Todd Atteberry Leave a Comment

Top: Crescent moon over a male stone of West Kennet Avenue, Avebury

I’ve written about this before I believe. Twice even. I get these questions every year about this time, so here’s how I see it.

The historical record is in this case, a record of people looking at the historical record and not finding much. They find harvest celebrations around the end of October, but that would be case, wouldn’t it? There’s enough archaeological and folklore facts to make the case that these festivals also included fire and the idea that during this time, the bridge between this world and the after life is open. You find some general agreement about these festivals throughout the ancient Celtic world.

Their timing appeared to be halfway between the summer solstice and the winter equinox, making this a seasonal celebration to Pagans, one of the four based on the old Gaelic calendar. But without some celestial marker, it’s hard to accept that there was a universal date and time for Samhain.

Alignments in Irish neolithic tombs that capture the sunrise attest that from the earliest days, this was an important time in their calendar. These early cultures were agricultural societies, and though this time of year is of course the harvest – it’s not particularly important otherwise to the farmer. That said, it could have great importance to the herdsman as time was running out to have your animals in shelter for the winter.

It would make sense that for ancient peoples, time was best managed in tasks, like the harvest, rather than fixed dates determined by stars and the position of the sun. In this way, the crops and the animals would speak to them as well as the sky about where the earth was in its cycle. Try as we might, we’ve never been able to completely fix the sky to our human calendar. It’s impossible to miss their influence, but I can’t help but believe that to an ancient people, they put more stock in the things of this earth, that their survival depended upon. And from that, they found the primary source of their magic.

Besides, by the time people were starting to compile calendars, there was nobody alive to read the alignments of neolithic passage tombs, that knowledge long since forgotten. We know from watching the history of Christianity, beliefs change, whether it’s about a Hebrew god or the influence of the planets on the people of the earth.

View from the center burial chamber of West Kennet Long Barrow, Avebury. Often these tombs were aligned to specific sunrises or other astrological events. On the appropriate morning, a beam of light would shine down the passage, illuminating the central chamber. Unless it was raining.

The nuances of nature would have made for appropriate, and reliable deities and oracles. So dates would likely have been fluid, based on how quickly crops came to maturity, the weather over the summer and the weather at harvest.

In Ireland, these festivals went on for a week – three days before and three days after. Perhaps this was a way to be sure you got the magic moment during the celebration. Or perhaps, it was never meant to be thought of as a single day.

Why is this important? That’s simple. Halloween is a day, or to be precise, an evening. When the church moved All Hallows from November 2 to November 1, it was with the express intent of shutting down the ancient celebrations which they still viewed as pagan, at midnight on October 31. At midnight, it became a holy day.

That’s Halloween. Samhain is the ancient festival whose memory inspired it, through folk customs passed down from generation to generation, carried from one land to another, mixed and intermingled, where people still acted out the old rituals, even if they no longer remembered the meaning behind them, or even timed them to the stars, but instead, the calendar.

So for those still hung about up about people having Halloween parties on days other than October 31, you can let it go. It’s entirely reasonable to think that it was the whole cycle of the moon which marked the festivities. Halloween today is for the living, it’s a fun holiday, no boring family traditions to deal with, no long travels for a dinner.

And what of your Samhain rituals held on these adjacent days to this most of holy of holidays to Pagans and Wiccans? Well, if you discount any celestial influence, any specific signs of nature that the time is upon us, then you’re fine. You can take solace in the idea that for this entire cycle of the moon, the dead walked among us, and it was easier to cross to the other side if that was your wish.

You have to keep in mind though, that if the ancients chose a time because it had magical significance to them, then to ignore that is to ignore the magical foundation of the holiday. They were convinced of the significance of a particular date, that they spent thousand of hours constructing tombs to reflect his belief. We’re talking about a moment where the veil between the two worlds was thinnest. I can’t help but think time was important, even the hour. After all, it’s our only holiday dedicated to necromancy.

Because that’s the dark side of the Samain/Halloween coin. It’s not all about making merry and bringing in the light.

Crescent moon over female stone, West Kennet Avenue, Avebury

Some Pagans celebrate it on the exact midway point between the solstice and the equinox, and to me, that makes sense. The ancients didn’t have a calendar, but they did have a sky. And as we moved from clan based agricultural societies to communities, towns and cities, dates which could be marked by universal fixed events in the sky became more relevant.

The date of October 31 itself was rendered obsolete by tinkering with the calendar, so that now the original day in time that would have been October 31 is November 7. If you had looked to the stars in ancient times, you would have seen the Pleiades directly overhead at midnight the last day of October, which very well could have been the sign people were looking for. That date is now November 21.

The apex of the journey of the Pleiades was the exact moment, the early church chose to end the party. So that could be the magic hour as well.

And why should anyone care what the ancients thought about the veil between the two worlds being thinner at this time? The ancients had a very different outlook on death than we do, and life as well. Science had yet to throw water on their beliefs, so they developed a finer since of instinct than we have now. They saw what they saw, and didn’t have to worry whether what they saw was real or not. If they saw it, it was real. And they dealt with death personally, without having the ugly bits shielded from their eyes. In short, they knew more about the subject than we do.

Halloween is a fun time of year, a chance to dabble in scares for a day, to disguise yourself in costume and run amok. Samhain as practiced by many pagans is little more than that, a gathering, a celebration and a recognition that this time is important.

To others, it’s still a chance to test the thickness of the veil, to see who wants to come across, or to slip over to the other side themselves. Just be back before the curtain closes.

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Is it Halloween or Samhain? What’s the real difference and when is it?